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Moscow Mayoral Elections 2013

Sooo, tomorrow is the day when we, Muscovites, choose the mayor of our super rich capital city.

Sooo, tomorrow is the day when we, Muscovites, choose the mayor of our super rich capital city. To be honest I’ve seen only 2 electoral campaigns out of 6, I did not bother to check out anything suggested by Mitrokhin or Levichev or Melnikov or Degtyarov, they all look a bit lame to me. Posters with a close-up of Nikolai Levichev’s “truthful” eyes, or Sergey Mitrokhin’s promise to “return Moscow to its citizens” did not look too appealing to me, so Peter and I focused on two main candidates in this electoral battle (not so much a battle, we all know who’s going to win): Sobyanin from Putin’s team and Navalny, the prominent opposition figure in Russia.

Sobyanin’s campaign looks pretty good, it’s very detailed and focused on immediate actions like expanding Moscow’s underground, modernizing railway connections between the city and Moscow region and so on. Navalny’s campaign is less detailed and is focused more around fighting the corruption, and establishing transparency in the whole operation of the City Hall – things I agree with. I have doubts about Navalny’s ability to run the city properly as he has no experience in it, Sobyanin on the other hand proved himself to be a good manager, and can demonstrate some good results (judging by what people and newspapers say as I don’t really have solid opinion on that after living here only for 2 months). I’m also not sure how one person can fight the whole bribe-based system which has been running pretty smoothly all this time with friends and family members of the ones in power miraculously winning tenders on government orders. No one is going to let Navalny even try, I think. So no chance of him winning… Well, despite that I am still going to give my vote to Alexei Navalny. Not because I’m a great fan of his opinions (although I do agree with some of them), or speeches, or his electoral campaign, I’m going to vote for him just to say that I’m against one party ruling everything in the country, I’m against theft and permissiveness in the government structures, and I want people’s mentality to change to demand more transparency and openness in how everything in the country is run.

I wonder if Navalny will get more than 20% of votes… We’ll wait and see.

I also hope that Navalny is not a Kremlin’s project like some opinions suggest, maybe I’m naive but I hope Navalny is no one’s project… :)

It’s a shame Peter can’t vote yet, his passport will be ready only next week, and so will his registration (‘propiska’). But I’ve managed to persuade my brother to vote with me tomorrow, yay!

UPDATE: Here Are The Results Of The Elections: Sobyanin Won With 51% Of Votes, Navalny Got Around 27%, And Melnikov From The Communist Party Received 10% Of Votes (Communist Party Is Pretty Popular Among Older Generation), Others Got Less Than 4%. Congratulations, Mr. Sobyanin!

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