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#15 - JRL 9042 - JRL Home
RIGHTISTS PONDER THE QUESTION: TO BE OR NOT TO BE?

MOSCOW, January 30 (RIA Novosti) - SPS leader will be elected at the party congress, the party press service announced after the meeting of the SPS Council on Saturday.

The Party Council decided to conduct the extraordinary congress not later than in May 2005.

It addressed the federal political council of the party with a request to expedite the decision on the date of the congress in order to start the procedures of self-appointment of candidates for the post of party chairman.

The Party Council also suggested to the political council to increase to the maximum the representation of regional branches at the congress

The leader will be elected by direct vote of the congress delegates, the press service announced.

Member of the SPS federal political council Boris Nadezhdin announced at the meeting of the Party Council that he intends to put forward his candidature for the post of the party chairman. "The party leader will be elected during the congress by direct secret vote," he told the journalists.

Rated voting was recommended for party list leaders during the 2007 State Duma elections and during the 2007 campaign to elect the SPS candidate for the post of Russian president (the presidential elections will be held a year later).

During the parliamentary elections held on December 7, 2003, neither SPS (Irina Khakhamada, Boris Nemtsov, Anatoly Chubais), nor Yabloko (led by Grigory Yavlinski) managed to pass the 5% barrier and lost the chance to participate in the political struggle. Moreover, in the light of the recent State Duma decision, which raises the barrier for participation in the parliamentary elections to 7%, the chances of these political pariahs of the rightist orientation are becoming even fewer.

"We must have the leader to ensure operational management of the party," said another member of the SPS political council Leonid Goizman. At the same time, he noted, the operational management of the party has been recently conducted even better than prior to the parliamentary elections.

Mr. Goizman believes, though, that the party made a mistake when it substituted the institute of co-chairmanship with a single party leader.

"The election of a party leader will not help us now. Leaders are not elected, they simply exist," he presented a personal viewpoint.

Commenting on the issue of uniting efforts with other liberal parties before the 2007 parliamentary elections, Mr. Goizman said that there were several variants of such unification. "The first option is to unite the existing democratic organizations - Yabloko, SPS and some other parties," he said.

The second option is to create "the unified ballot," representing all democratic forces. The idea belongs to Boris Nadezhdin.

According to Mr. Nadezhdin, "the unified ballot" will allow the opposition to preserve Yabloko and SPS as independent parties. Meanwhile, the ballot can still represent various political forces, "including, for example, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Garry Kasparov."

"The third option is to shuffle all figures on the board and create a new political party under a new name," concluded Mr. Goizman.