Photo: PhotoXpress
“I am calling on you to fork out 1.50 rubles for a text message and vote
for me,” Maria Butina, 22, a hopeful in the Altai region, wrote on her
LiveJournal blog. “Together we can make the world better for the profit of
all.”
Another candidate wrote on Vkontakte.ru: “Please send a text message to 2420”
because “to win, I really need your help!”
An unprecedented open primary election is under way within Young Guard for
candidates between the ages of 21 and 35 to run on the United Russia ticket in
December’s vote.
The absence of a requirement that contenders be members of United Russia or
Young Guard, the youth wing of the party, seems to have attracted some young
people who don’t necessarily support United Russia, but are ready to use the
party to get into power.
“Of course, I have no illusions about the existing regime and the ruling
party,” Butina wrote. “But if I want to change anything for the better, I must
act in the only way possible today — within United Russia.”
While eligible candidates are not required to join Young Guard or United
Russia, they must support their policies and be Russian nationals, according to
the Web site for the primary election, MP2011.ru.
Mobile phone voting will be one of the criteria by which a public commission
will choose winners from the primary election, said Artyom Turov, who is
coordinating the voting effort. The other criteria will be candidates’ election
platforms, their meetings with voters, and the number of signatures they manage
to collect in support of their candidacies, Turov said.
The Young Guard primary election started April 27 and will end June 19.
The winners will be chosen from June 19 to 25, and a portion of them will
participate in United Russia’s primary election in July.
Those who win United Russia’s primary election will be placed on the party’s
list for the Dec. 4 Duma vote.
A United Russia spokeswoman said the program for the July primary election has
not been finalized, so she was unable to comment on it at this time.
Turov said Young Guard winners who do not take part in the Duma primaries would
participate in primaries for 28 elections to regional legislatures that would
also take place on Dec. 4.
Young Guard’s primary election is being held in 75 of Russia’s 83 regions. In each
region, two or more winners will be selected, depending on the number of voters
in the region.
United Russia first held a primary election to select candidates for the 2007
Duma elections, but only members of the party or Young Guard were allowed to take
part.
In the past five years, more than 10,000 members of Young Guard have become
lawmakers at various levels of government, said Young Guard senior official
Timur Prokopenko, speaking to about 5,000 activists at a Moscow rally in late
April where he announced the start of the primary election.
The voting text messages, which will actually cost 1.44 rubles (5 cents) per
vote, will generate a small profit for several mobile phone operators and the
company that created the online voting service, but none of the proceeds will
return to Young Guard, said Ivan Khmelevskoi, head of the public relations
agency Vektor Rosta, which was hired by Young Guard to develop the Web site for
the primary election.
He said Vektor Rosta was working for Young Guard free of charge, for
self-promotional purposes meant to “show [future] clients that we successfully
implemented a project.”
All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
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