Moscow News
http://www.mnweekly.ru/
June 26, 2008
Liberal Yabloko gets New Leader
By Anna Arutunyan
A massive overhaul of Russia's oldest democratic party, Yabloko, has lead to the replacement of its founding leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, with Sergei Mitrokhin, a deputy in the Moscow City Duma that some members of this oppositionist party have described as a hardliner.
"We are going to keep a single team, one in which the roles have changed," Mitrokhin told The Moscow News Tuesday, when asked what kind of relationship he would maintain with Yavlinsky.
"This will lead to a stronger party, to more efficiency, and we will work together."
A party congress on Saturday chose Mitrokhin out of six contenders with 60 percent of the votes.
"I very much hope the party can exist without me," news agencies quoted Yavlinsky as saying. "This in many ways has been my life. One needs to allow people to grow, become leaders."
But internal changes within party structures mean that Yavlinsky will retain an influential role. On Friday, Yavlinsky suggested the creation of a collegiate political committee, asking that he be nominated to be a member. The committee will have considerable powers, which will keep the influence of the party leader - in this case Mitrokhin - in check.
For instance, it will formulate the party's policies on key issues and keep track of funds, the Kommersant business daily reports. Plans to reform the party were underway as early as December, but were not leaked to the press.
Yabloko emerged in 1993 as a public organization with a social-democratic and liberal-democratic ideology. Its name, which means "apple" in Russian, comes from the first initials of three founders: Yavlinsky, who was an economic advisor to President Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s, Yuri Boldyrev, and Vladimir Lukin.
Yabloko faired relatively well as a parliamentary force in the early 1990s, winning 27 seats in the Duma in 1993 and 45 seats in 1995. But by 2003, it gained just four seats, and failed to pass the 7 percent threshold in the latest parliamentary elections in December.
While the party has blamed its failures on a flawed vote, observers have pointed to its repeated failures to form a bloc with Russia's other liberal party, SPS (Union of Right Forces), an oppositionist movement that supported liberal economic reforms, although Yabloko contends that notion.
Negotiations to merge had appeared hopeful ahead of the 2003 vote, but by 2007 seemed to have turned into a mere formality. It was argued, meanwhile, that Mitrokhin would be the hardest to persuade to accept concessions that would allow for a bloc.
When asked about the possibility of merging with SPS, Mitrokhin said his party has a "wider goal."
"We want to unite all... forces under one platform," he told The Moscow News. "This platform must be democratic, and it must accept the mistakes that were made by... movements during the 1990s."
Mitrokhin said his party has the "moral right" to speak about the "mistakes" because it did not support the decisions that were behind them. Among some of the "mistakes" supported by liberal forces in the 1990s, the Yabloko leader singled out "loan for shares" auctions, under which state companies were privatized in exchange for a loan to the cash-strapped government; privatization reforms that led to inflation and left many people without their savings; and policies that led to the economic crisis of 1998.
"These mistakes have discredited... movements" amongst the population, he said.