Elections of the mayor of Izhevsk will be held without obvious favorites

The City Council of Izhevsk on Thursday launched a competition to select candidates for the vacant post of mayor. Its results will be summed up at the end of August, and at the beginning of September deputies will have to choose a new mayor. At the same time, there is no obvious favorite for the mayor’s chair, which can be considered an atypical situation for the capital of the Russian region.

June 29 City Duma of Izhevsk announced about the start of the competition for the post of head of the city. Applications will be accepted from July 5 to August 7. Candidates must submit a city development concept or an action program to the competition commission, and on August 24, the commission will select the two most worthy applicants based on these documents. The session of the City Duma, at which the deputies will elect the head of the city, is tentatively scheduled for September 5.

The competition commission consists of 12 people. From the municipal government, it included the chairman of the City Duma Farit Gubaev, his deputies Andrey Zyuzin and Nikolai Shvetsov, the head of the commission on local self-government Alexei Garipov (all United Russia), the head of the Communist Party faction Kirill Alexandrov and the head of the LDPR faction Alexei Kuznetsov. The second half of the commission will later be appointed by the head of Udmurtia Alexander Brechalov.

Recall, at the end of May, the mayor of Izhevsk, Oleg Bekmemetyev, who had held this post since 2018, resigned of his own free will. He explained the resignation by moving to another job, but his new appointment has not yet been announced.

Farit Gubaev told reporters that the City Duma apparatus is already receiving calls from interested citizens. “I think there will be many participants,” the speaker suggested, adding that the commission is considering the possibility of broadcasting candidates’ speeches online.

According to Aleksey Garipov, the future mayor should be “persistent”, since the city is dependent on co-financing from the federal and republican budgets.

So far, none of the Izhevsk politicians has announced plans to take part in the contest. One of the deputies of the City Duma told Kommersant on condition of anonymity that Dmitry Chistyakov, deputy head of the Izhevsk administration for social policy, is most often named as a possible future mayor. Other sources of Kommersant consider Dmitry Lukin, deputy of the State Council of Udmurtia, the owner of the production and financial group Zardon Group, to be the most likely candidate.

Although different names are now being called, including acting head of the city Vladimir Gulyaev, the real favorite will appear after the start of accepting documents, and possibly closer to the end, Mr. Garipov believes. “There are still almost two months before the competition. Now they will not publish any names, so that during this time there will be no attempts to find any weaknesses or compromising evidence. Everyone is still watching, because it is not clear who they will compete with,” the deputy explains. “When the main candidate appears, then other participants will catch up, and there will be a full-fledged campaign to promote him, conversations with deputies, and so on.”

According to Alexei Garipov, the authorities remember the history of 2018 and do not intend to repeat the mistakes.

Then Izhevsk for almost half a year remained without a mayor. The first competition was canceled, according to the official version, due to the absence of half of the members of the competition committee. As a result of the second, two candidates for the post of head of the city were identified, but the then adviser to the head of Udmurtia, Konstantin Suntsov, who was considered a protégé of the republic’s leadership, could not get the required number of votes. After that, the third competition was announced, as a result of which Oleg Bekmemetyev became the mayor: at the session of the City Duma, he was supported by 36 out of 37 deputies.

Alfred Zinnatullin, a member of the standing committee of the City Duma on social policy, notes that the choice of the future mayor will depend on the position of the head of Udmurtia: “I completely trust him in this regard. For example, we did not even consider Oleg Bekmemetyev 4.5 years ago, but the head of the republic proposed him, and in my opinion he was the best mayor of the city.” Vice-mayor Dmitry Chistyakov really can apply for the post of the head of the city, the deputy believes: “He has a lot of leadership experience, he worked in the banking sector. In the administration of Izhevsk, he formed a good team of the social bloc. In addition, he is also known for his activity in the Council of Fathers, which was also noticed at the republican level.”

However, Mr. Zinnatullin does not rule out that the current acting head Vladimir Gulyaev, who will now have the opportunity to prove himself and show how he runs the city, can also apply for the post of mayor. At the same time, other possible candidates are named, including those not from Izhevsk. “In any case, of course, it is too early to make any predictions and make assumptions,” concludes Alfred Zinnatullin.

Mikhail Krasilnikov, Izhevsk