The head of Saratov went to the polls - Newspaper Kommersant No. 154 (7355) of 08/24/2022

The head of Saratov went to the polls - Newspaper Kommersant No. 154 (7355) of 08/24/2022



The head of Saratov, Mikhail Isaev, announced on Tuesday the early resignation of his powers in connection with participation in the elections to the regional Duma. He himself announced this in his Telegram channel. Acting head of the city will be Lada Mokrousova, who until recently led one of the districts of Saratov. Mr. Isaev's main rival in the single-mandate constituency will be Nikolai Bondarenko, a well-known communist in the region. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is sure that "in the event of fair elections" the ex-mayor "has no chance", but the expert suggests that the image of a strong business executive will help Mikhail Isaev's victory.

In an address to the townspeople, Mikhail Isaev, who has been in charge of Saratov since October 2017, recalled the main achievements in this post. In particular, “a significant number of landscaping projects were implemented”, roads were repaired, social facilities and a beach were built, and the trolleybus fleet was updated. Previously, the regional center "was deprived of attention", and the cost per inhabitant "greatly inferior to rural areas," said Mr. Isaev. But already in 2021, in terms of spending per Saratov citizen, the city became “second among similar administrative centers in Russia”, surpassing Volgograd, Omsk, Samara and Ufa in this indicator, the former mayor emphasized.

“All this was done thanks to the support of the federal center, personally the speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, the regional government, and most importantly, the residents of Saratov, who, I hope, will support my decision to continue defending their interests at the regional level,” Mikhail Isaev summed up. He also said that he had enlisted the support of Acting Governor Roman Busargin and, if elected to the Regional Duma, would continue to work in his team. Mr. Busargin himself, commenting on the resignation of the mayor, said that he had established himself as "a reliable person who is not indifferent to people's problems."

Mikhail Isaev in 2006-2007 he was a deputy of the Saratov City Duma, in December 2007 he was elected to the Regional Duma, in December 2011 - to the State Duma, in October 2012 he was delegated to the Federation Council by the Saratov Regional Duma. In 2016, he again became a deputy of the State Duma, and in October 2017 he headed Saratov. The powers of Mr. Isaev were to end in 2025, simultaneously with the powers of the current City Duma.

The acting head of Saratov will be Lada Mokrousova, who has been in charge of the Leninsky district of the city since 2017, and before that she worked as deputy head of the administration of the Volzhsky district for economics. Roman Busargin has already met with and. about. Mayor and said that he had set a number of tasks for her, including preparation for winter, improvement, repair of roads, readiness of educational institutions for the start of the new academic year, implementation of state programs.

United Russia nominated Mikhail Isaev for elections to the regional duma. He is running in the Zavodskoy single-mandate constituency No. 4, where one of his rivals will be Nikolai Bondarenko, a former regional Duma deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who was deprived of his deputy mandate in February for violations of his income declaration. Kommunist runs several YouTube channels, the largest of which (Deputy's Diary) has over 1.7 million subscribers. Earlier, Mr. Isaev said that he specifically asked the party to nominate him in the Zavodskoy district in order to "prevent a blogger financed by foreign companies from deceiving fellow countrymen." “I cannot allow a showman, who has not a single solved problem behind him, to fool factory workers with populist statements and meet with residents only for the sake of broadcasting on the Internet,” the mayor emphasized then.

The leader of the Communist Party faction in the regional Duma, Alexander Anidalov, believes that in the event of fair elections, Mikhail Isaev has no chance against Nikolai Bondarenko. “The fact that the mayor of the city was defiantly put up against Bondarenko suggests that United Russia is trying to justify the result of the elections: they say, Nikolai lost to the former head of the city. I think the authorities will do everything to keep Nikolai out of the Regional Duma, for them this is an even more fundamental issue than all the opposition candidates put together. I think this will be the main point of confrontation in the elections,” the communist suggested.

Political scientist Alexander Panteleev believes that “in the bottom line” Nikolai Bondarenko is better known from the scandalous side: “Although he says sensible things, speaks, and so on, he is promoted on the Internet as a scandalous politician. Mikhail Isaev still knows the city and its problems, travels everywhere and achieves something. He is a business executive, and such people are trusted more than pure politicians. Therefore, Bondarenko's chances against Isaev are not very big": according to the expert's forecast, the communist can count on "20 percent" of the votes.

Sergey Petunin, Saratov



Source link