New People nominate Deputy Speaker of the State Duma for Mayor of Moscow

The Moscow branch of the New People party at its conference on Sunday nominated State Duma Vice Speaker Vladislav Davankov as a candidate for mayor of Moscow in the autumn elections. On May 19, the party already held an informal conference on his nomination for the mayor of the capital in the format of a picnic in Serebryany Bor. But at that time, the elections had not yet been scheduled, so after the Moscow City Duma adopted the relevant resolution on June 7, the party had to redo all the necessary procedures.

Anna Trofimenko, secretary of the metropolitan branch, shared her plans for the election campaign with the delegates: “We have an ambitious goal: to travel 100 districts, see how people live, what problems they have. We have already begun and have seen that Moscow is a city of contrasts. We realized that there are many myths in Moscow, both people and officials live by them.” As evidence, she listed three common judgments about the capital and invited the activists to guess if it was true or not. The first – that Moscow must continuously grow and condense, without which there will be no development – was called a myth. “Paris and New York have not grown much over the past 20 years, but there is economic growth,” the head of the department explained. The high salaries of Muscovites were also recognized as mythical. But with the statement that Moscow is the greenest metropolis in the world, which the audience met with distrust, Mrs. Trofimenko agreed: 49% of the capital’s area is occupied by green spaces. But the townspeople do not feel this, because most of the area falls on green areas such as Bitsevsky Park, and in ordinary areas where people live, there is not so much greenery, Anna Trofimenko emphasized.

The head of the party and its faction in the State Duma, Aleksey Nechaev, told how the vote on the candidate for mayor took place: “Our activists discussed for a long time, for several minutes, approaches and opinions fought. We always have multiple opinions. We always vote in the Duma in different ways.” But the candidacy of Vladislav Davankov, according to the leader, was unanimously approved by the department.

Then the candidate himself spoke, who told how he came up with the idea to run for mayor. Mr. Davankov broke his leg after slipping “on Moscow tiles”, lay in the hospital and “thought about Moscow”. As part of these reflections, the deputy studied the development strategy of the capital until 2030, which stated that by this time 20 million people would live in the city. “The main problem is the very compaction and expansion that everyone feels on themselves. In my opinion, Moscow should be different, in five years it should be made convenient for Muscovites,” said Vladislav Davankov. Therefore, the basis of his election program will be a moratorium on compact building and a course towards the uniform development of the city. He also said that he was going to launch the Million IT Women project in the capital, within which girls would be taught the basics of coding, working with neural networks and artificial intelligence for free.

Ksenia Veretennikova