Russia strikes dozens of opposition candidates from ballot ahead of Duma vote
Ahead of the Sept. 18-20 State Duma elections, Russian courts have disqualified dozens of opposition candidates, including nearly all of Yabloko's remaining list, citing a range of formal violations. Analysts say the purge aims to suppress protest voting and turnout.
With Russia's State Duma elections set for Sept. 18-20, courts across the country have removed dozens of opposition candidates from the ballot in recent weeks. Among them is Udmurtia politician Iya Boronina, disqualified by the republic's highest court after a rival from the A Just Russia party argued she illegally used the song "Bad to the Bone" by George Thorogood & The Destroyers in a campaign video without a license, which the plaintiff claimed could not be legally paid for from a campaign account. Boronina said the case was heard without her being notified of the hearing, and her subsequent appeal was rejected.
Yabloko hit hardest
Boronina is one of 29 candidates from the liberal Yabloko party struck from the State Duma race, four of whom led regional party branches. Yabloko is the only party running on an anti-war platform, and last month the Supreme Court already removed it from the nationwide party-list ballot. It can still field single-member district candidates, but their number has fallen from 135 to 106. In regional legislative races, Yabloko will compete in just one of 39 regions after courts disqualified its lists in seven others, including in Tomsk, citing campaign finance and copyright violations. The most common grounds for disqualification were old social media posts referencing late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Analyst Andras Toth-Czifra said sidelining Yabloko reduces the chance of protest voting, thereby helping suppress turnout — a longstanding Kremlin tactic in legislative elections.
Pressure spreads to "systemic" opposition
Even parties nominally tolerated within the system have faced growing pressure. At least eight Communist Party candidates have been disqualified, including Nikolai Bondarenko, whose viral debate appearance made him one of the most discussed election stories online. The official reason was an old post featuring a photo of Navalny, though the disqualification followed his rising visibility in a district considered a stronghold of Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. In the Kursk region, 75-year-old Nikolai Skrynnik withdrew from a regional parliament race, saying he faced pressure from within his own Communist Party rather than from outside it.
