United Russia summed up the first results of the registration of candidates for the primaries

“United Russia” summed up the first results of the registration of candidates for the party’s primaries, which will end on April 27. The average competition was 5.3 candidates per seat. Deputy Secretary of the United Russia General Council Sergei Perminov presented a “portrait of a candidate”, who participates in the so-called preliminary voting.

Among the candidates:

Most of the candidates are from among representatives of small and medium-sized businesses (29%), from the education sector (12%), from the sphere of state and municipal administration (12%), from the sphere of culture (6%), social activists (6%), from the social spheres (4%), from healthcare (4%), from housing and communal services (3%). 81 participants of the special operation registered for the primaries.

Perminov recalled that 182 election campaigns of various levels in 54 regions are coming in September. The selection of candidates for the primaries will be held online everywhere, except for new territories.

Analyzing the composition of the participants in the primaries does not always make sense, says Mikhail Vinogradov, president of the Petersburg Politics Foundation: the participation of some of them is nominal. “Therefore share [представителей] businesses should be evaluated already in the lists, but it is clear that they still have more pragmatic motives to become deputies than, for example, public sector employees,” he said.

The starting primaries were conceived with two goals – as a way to remove part of the inter-elite contradictions in advance and as a way to create an informational occasion for the party a few months before the elections, Vinogradov notes. “These tasks were only partially solved, since the real competition in the primaries is not the same depending on the overregulation of the situation in the regions, and the agenda of the primaries attracts the attention of party activists and supporters to a greater extent,” he says.

APEC General Director Dmitry Orlov believes that now the patriotic consolidation has affected even the protest regions. According to Konstantin Kostin, head of the Civil Society Development Fund, the society is affected by the factor of delayed decisions in many spheres of life: “Regional inter-elite conflicts are being frozen. All such factors will act for some time until public opinion decides that the problems of the current stage have been overcome.

He compares the current inertia to an insurance policy: voters are waiting for United Russia to fulfill what it promised before the 2021 parliamentary elections.