Russian election commissioner tells both second-round gubernatorial candidates in Primorye to sit out the third round

Russian Central Election Commission Ella Pamfilova is urging both candidates in Primorye’s invalidated runoff gubernatorial election to refrain from running again in the third round, arguing that incumbent Andrey Tarasenko and challenger Andrey Ishchenko “have lost the public’s confidence and discredited themselves in the eyes of voters.”

Ishchenko encouraged Pamfilova to resign instead, calling her “uniform populism” an attempt interfere in Primorye’s democracy. Tarasenko, who has waffled about whether he’ll run in the third round, has not commented on Pamfilova’s statement.

Trudolyubov on Moscow's civilizing burden in Primorye

In an op-ed for the newspaper Vedomosti, columnist Maxim Trudolyubov argues that Moscow is unlikely to learn any useful lessons from its struggle to manage Primorye’s latest gubernatorial election. Officials in the Kremlin, he says, will interpret the public’s rejection of the United Russia candidate (personally endorsed by Putin) as a rebellion by Russia’s ungrateful Far Eastern “partisans,” reaffirming the federal government’s belief in its own “civilizing mission.”

In response to Moscow’s continued managed politics and disrespect, Trudolyubov says, the people of Primorye won’t take to the streets in protest, but they will increasingly take the federal government’s legitimacy less seriously, robbing the Kremlin’s political system of its “main resource.”