The Congress of Russian Communities (KRO), a right-wing political and human rights movement, will cooperate with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin-backed All-Russia People’s Front (ONF), a senior KRO member said on Tuesday.
“I am set for close cooperation [with the ONF],” Alexander Bosykh said during a meeting in Moscow with representatives of youth organizations involved in the ONF.
Putin called for the creation of the All-Russia People’s Front, whose name echoes popular communist movements, at the United Russia party conference on May 6. The new movement is intended to broaden the party’s electoral base with “non-party people,” including trade unions, NGOs, business associations and youth groups.
Bosykh praised the creation of the ONF, saying that it would become a ground “where one can work regardless of his political preferences, sympathies and antipathies” and solve concrete problems. He said, however, that it was too early to speak about the KRO joining the Putin-backed movement.
Some analysts see the creation of the ONF as Putin’s bid to boost his United Russia party’s flagging popularity and head off a potentially damaging poor showing in parliamentary elections due in December.
The Congress of Russian Commons was created in the early 1990s as a nationalist political party to promote the rights of ethnic Russians in the newly independent former Soviet republics. The organization was dissolved a decade later and revived in 2006 by its founder Dmitry Rogozin, currently Russia’s envoy to NATO, as a movement aimed at protecting human rights.
The Russian Justice Ministry registered the KRO in early May, finally satisfying the organization’s registration request, which had been denied several times.
As one of the KRO leaders, Bosykh said he intended to promote stricter immigration regulations in Russia, better control of the money allocated by the government for youth programs, as well as direct dialogue between conflicting ethnic groups.
MOSCOW, May 17 (RIA Novosti)