The Communists are starting the Main – Newspaper Kommersant No. 210 (7411) of 11/14/2022

In the suburbs on Saturday, another plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was held, at which the communists discussed, among other things, the topic of fair elections and the fight against falsification and manipulation. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov recalled that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation recently presented its draft Electoral Code in the State Duma. But the party members are not going to stop there, and the next step is the draft Constitution. The expert believes that the purpose of these initiatives of the communists is to show themselves as a large-scale political force and send “messages” to different audiences.

Before the beginning plenum its participants were shown a film about violations in the September elections in the regions, where various technologies and innovations in the electoral legislation were evaluated. As the voice-over explained, tools such as “drying the turnout” and early voting, as well as innovations such as the abolition of party lists, play into the hands of the party in power. Ex-deputy of the Saratov Regional Duma Nikolai Bondarenko told from the screen how he was not allowed to get acquainted with the list of voters. “But the queen of manipulation is, without a doubt, a system of remote electronic voting,” the authors of the film are sure.

The work of the plenum began with the fact that those gathered paid tribute to the memory of ten communists who died during the special operation, and then admitted several new members to the party.

Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov delivered an hour-long report in which he recalled that December marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the USSR, and also listed all the important milestones in Soviet history.

At some point, a fire alarm suddenly went off in the hall, but the party leader continued to calmly read the report, and no one left the hall. Later, the press secretary of the head of the Communist Party, Alexander Yushchenko, told reporters that there was no fire and the alarm turned on by accident.

Mr. Zyuganov paid much attention to the topic of fair elections and “theft of votes” from the communists in favor of “United Russia”. “The authorities have clearly confused the mobilization of the country to fight an external threat and squeezing out results in the elections. Time demands something fundamentally different from the state: clarity of goals and honest conversation with the masses. But those in power do not dare to go for it, ”complained the chairman of the Central Committee.

He also recalled that on November 10, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation submitted to the State Duma a draft Electoral Code, on which a group led by the first deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Legislation, Yuri Sinelshchikov, worked on for a year. Now, as Gennady Zyuganov said, this group will take up the drafting of the Constitution.

Note that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation announced the start of work on its own draft of the Basic Law back in the summer of 2020, during the all-Russian vote on amendments to the Constitution.

Then the party prepared its proposals, among which it identified 15 priority ones, but none of these ideas was taken into account in the course of the reform. Then the leader of the Communist Party promised to insist on the adoption of the “Constitution of Democracy”. It was supposed to hold a “popular referendum” on 15 major amendments, but these plans were prevented by the difficult epidemiological situation.

“We have accumulated proposals, developments. Our key proposals are connected with the fact that it is necessary to prescribe the issues of nationalization, fixing the retirement age as it was before the pension reform. A number of proposals are connected with the democratization of political processes,” Yury Afonin, First Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, told Kommersant. The party plans to submit the draft Constitution for wide public discussion. “Everything should be in order – let’s now deal with the Electoral Code,” Mr. Afonin said.

Yuri Sinelshchikov told Kommersant that the Communist Party team is going to start creating a draft Constitution in January 2023 and complete this work within a year.

According to him, the document “absolutely” will cut the powers of the president, while the powers of the Federal Assembly, on the contrary, will be expanded. “It will be written there that the prosecutor’s office provides the highest supervision of the rule of law, the prosecutor general has the right to legislative initiative, judges are elected by the people, and, of course, the recall of deputies (by voters.— “b”),” the communist explained.

Political scientist Aleksey Makarkin believes that in the case of the Electoral Code and the Constitution, the communists want to “scale up”: “The communists had a solid second place due to the fact that they had a very different, but collectively large electorate. There was a communist core, and a general protest electorate, and an element of the democratic electorate, which went to vote for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation as the most oppositional of the passing parties. From the beginning of the special military operation, the democrats began to “fall off” – for them the position of the communists is unacceptable. The most patriotic ones, who believe that in this situation it is necessary to support the authorities, began to leave. Therefore, the communists need to be shown that they are a strong, influential party that puts forward large-scale initiatives.” At the same time, the Electoral Code is not of interest to the general public, but is of interest to the politicized part of society, including people with liberal views, the expert emphasizes: “Thus, the communists make it clear that they also advocate general democratic positions.” On the whole, the draft Constitution is more likely aimed at keeping the party’s ideological core, Mr. Makarkin summarizes.

Ksenia Veretennikova