According to the expert, the initiative of United Russia to ensure the sanitary safety of the election campaign is in any case advantageous
United Russia called on all participants of the election campaign to sign an agreement on taking measures to ensure the sanitary safety of campaign events. According to the press service of the party, the parties to the agreement ” are invited to take on voluntary and conscious obligations to organize the electoral process in compliance with all anti-weed norms.”
Photo: council.gov.ru.
At a briefing held on July 20, the secretary of the General Council of the party, Andrei Turchak, said that given the difficult epidemiological situation, responsible election participants should reduce to a minimum all mass campaigning events, and those that cannot be canceled should be transferred to an online format or held with a minimum audience.
“We call on candidates, agitators, election headquarters staff to provide personal protective equipment, strictly observing the requirements of the regional authorities, “the secretary of the General Council of United Russia explained the essence of the measures that the parties to the agreement should take.
We asked Vitaly Ivanov, a political scientist, expert on regional policy, adviser to the Chairman of the Board of the Civil Society Development Fund, to comment on the United Russia initiative and assess the prospects for its implementation.
Answering the question whether the party will not put itself at a disadvantage if it turns out to be the only one that has imposed restrictions on itself, the expert answered in the negative:
“No, it won’t. Moreover, if properly submitted, this will be credited to the party as a plus, that it responsibly approaches campaigning, conducting the campaign as a whole, taking into account the current epidemic, sanitary and other situation. A normal person, a normal voter, and such, I still want to believe, the majority, such decisions should be perceived approvingly.”
The consequences of the refusal of other parties to support the agreement, according to Vitaly Ivanov, will be negative only for themselves:
“Here, United Russia has a win-win, by and large, alignment. Because if they agree, they will go, as they say, for the “EP”. All the poles, all the positive PR go to her. And if they refuse, they immediately label themselves as not caring about the health of voters, spitting on the relevant rules and restrictions. Here, no matter how you look at it, there are only pluses for the EP.”
The expert considers the possible attempts of individual campaign participants to present the quarantine restrictions being taken as measures aimed at preventing their campaigning to be deliberately doomed to failure:
“If someone starts to say something like that, he will again look very, very ambiguous. And this is to put it mildly. The party proposed to accept certain restrictions for the sake of people’s health, and to question it … All this will sound very unconvincing, and I think this point of view will not receive wide support. ”