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People's Freedom Party Партия народной свободы Partiya narodnoy svobody | |
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| President | Mikhail Kasyanov |
| Founders | Vladimir Lysenko [ru], Stepan Sulakshin [ru], Vyacheslav Shostakovsky [ru] |
| Founded | November 17, 1990 (1990-11-17)(RPR) December 13, 2010 (2010-12-13)(PARNAS) June 16, 2012 (2012-06-16)(merged as RPR–PARNAS) July 5, 2015 (2015-07-05)(re-named as PARNAS) |
| Registered | March 14, 1991 (1991-03-14) May 5, 2012 (2012-05-05)(re-registered) |
| Dissolved | May 25, 2023 |
| Merger of | Forward, Russia! Peasant Party of Russia People's Freedom Party United People's Party of Soldiers' Mothers |
| Preceded by | Democratic platform of theCPSU |
| Headquarters | Moscow |
| Youth wing | People's Democratic Union of Youth Youth committee of Solidarity |
| Membership(2011) | 46,158 |
| Ideology | Republicanism Anti-Putinism Liberalism Conservative liberalism Federalism Atlanticism Anti-communism Pro-Europeanism Nemtsovism |
| Political position | Centre-right |
| National affiliation | Free Russia Forum |
| European affiliation | Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party |
| Colours | Dark violet Before 2012: Orange |
| Slogan | "For Russia without Lawlessness and Corruption" (Russian:"За Россию без произвола и коррупции")[1] |
| Seats in theState Duma[2] | 0 / 450 |
| Seats in theRegional Parliaments | 0 / 3,980 |
| Website | |
parnasparty | |
ThePeople's Freedom Party (Russian:Партия народной свободы,romanized: Partija narodnoj svobody), often known by its short formPARNAS (Russian:ПАРНАС),[3] and formerly theRepublican Party of Russia – People's Freedom Party,[4] and initiallyRepublican Party of Russia,[5] was aliberal-democraticpolitical party in Russia. It was one of the first opposition parties founded in the final years of the Soviet Union.
In 2007, it was denied re-registration and declared to be dissolved by theRussian Supreme Court. It was only after theEuropean Court of Human Rights ruled that the denial of registration was unlawful that it could restore its official registration in May 2012.
The party was dissolved by Russia'sSupreme Court on May 25, 2023 because it did not have the required number of branches and due to claims filed against existing branches by theFederal Taxation Service and theMinistry of Justice.[6][7]
The Republican Party of Russia was founded in 1990 by members of the Democratic Platform of the CPSU who had become disillusioned with the party's unwillingness to reform. The foundation of the new party took place in November 1990.Nikolay Lysenko,Stepan Sulakshin andVyacheslav Shostakovsky were elected as the three co-chairman. The Republican Party joined theDemocratic Russia bloc, an umbrella organisation of pro-democracy movements. The Republican Party was close to the Social Democratic Party of Russia, which was founded earlier in 1990. The two parties shared similar program and there were attempts to merge. The Republican Party's program has been characterised asliberal andpragmatic; similarly to the Social Democratic Party, however, the Republican Party had internal factions: ranging fromsocial democracy tosocial liberal toliberal conservative.
The RPR and the SDP formed aunited faction (Объединенная депутатская группа РПРФ/СДПР) in the RussianCongress of People's Deputies (later, they fused with similar groups to form the faction 'Left Centre', which was pro-reform but more moderate than groups like the 'Radical Democrats', which advocatedradical economic reforms). In contrast to the social democrats, the Republicans participated in the Movement of Democratic Reforms that was formed in summer, 1991 and included mostly liberal-minded formernomenklatura members (Alexander Yakovlev,Gavriil Popov et al.). The Republican Party initially supported bothYegor Gaidar's economic reforms andBoris Yeltsin in his conflict with the Supreme Soviet; later, some of the leaders turned more critical of Yeltsin. The Republican Party left the Democratic Russia bloc in October, 1993 due to disagreements with the bloc's policies.
Altogether, the party members won 12 seats in the newly elected parliament of 1993: 5 republicans within theYabloko bloc and 7 fromDemocratic Choice of Russia. In the 1995 legislative election, the party ran within the Pamfilova – Gurev – N.Lysenko bloc, which failed to cross the 5% barrier. Lysenko andElla Pamfilova won seat through majoritarian district.
At the end of 1998, Nikolay Lysenko, retaining the post of RP chairman, joinedYuri Luzhkov'sOtechestvo bloc, whereas a number of the regional organisations of the Republican Party cooperated with small liberal parties likeRight Cause orSergey Kiriyenko'sNew Force etc.
In 1999, Lysenko won a parliament seat in a majoritarian district. In 2002, the party was reorganized into the Republican Party of Russia.[8]
The party was described as the 'torchbearer' ofliberal anti-Kremlin opposition duringVladimir Putin's reign in the early 2000s.[9]
In 2006,Member of ParliamentVladimir Ryzhkov became party leader.[9]
In 2007, theRussian Supreme Court ruled the party to be dissolved, according to Ryzhkov because of the opposition to the government.[why?] In 2011 theEuropean Court of Human Rights ruled out the refusal to register the party was unlawful. Since 5 May 2012, theJustice Ministry has restored the state registration of the Republican Party of Russia.
In 2006–2010, the RPR was a member of the oppositioncoalition "The Other Russia". In 2010,Boris Nemtsov – one of president Putin's fiercest critics – set up thePeople's Freedom Party along with formerPrime MinisterMikhail Kasyanov, formerMember of ParliamentVladimir Ryzhkov andVladimir Milov, which then formed a liberal coalition with the RPR entitled"For Russia without Lawlessness and Corruption".[9] The People's Freedom Party worked on the base of Republican Party, and the two parties eventually merged in 2012.[9]
In 2011, the party's dissolution was held to be unlawful by theEuropean Court of Human Rights.[10] In June 2011 the party applied for re-registration, but the authorities blocked this on the grounds of "the inconsistency in the party's charter and other documents filed for the official registration", a decision Nemtsov and Kasyanov said was politically motivated and that meant the party could not participate in the2011 Russian legislative election.[11] However, in January 2012, following the entry into force of the ECtHR's judgment, theSupreme Court of the Russian Federation quashed its 2007 decision to dissolve the party.[12]
Member of Parliament for theA Just Russia partyGennady Gudkov discussed planning rallies againstVladimir Putin with RPR party leaderVladimir Ryzhkov during 2011.[13] TheFederal Security Service was closely monitoring Gudkov and secretly videotaped his discussions with Ryzhkov, which the FSB then released to the public to discredit him as a radical attempting to undermine the governing administration.[13] The Russian parliament subsequently voted to expel Gudkov for his open criticism of Putin, the first such expulsion since 1995.[13]
TheMinistry of Justice recognized the merger of the Republican Party and the People's Freedom Party (RPR–PARNAS) on 2 August 2012, after theEuropean Court of Human Rights ruled that the party should be restored in May of that year, and it supported the2011–13 Russian protests, although since then the party has been mostly on the decline in influence among opposition circles.[14]
In August 2012 Boris Nemtsov attacked President Putin, saying he had used his power to acquire for his personal use palaces,yachts, planes and other property that really belonged to the state.[9] Nemtsov said that Putin had been taking state property for a long time, and said he "thinks it all belongs to him.".[9]
During 2012 RPR-PARNAS participated inregional elections inBarnaul, winning 1 seat, andSaratov Oblast,Tuva, winning 2 seats.
| Time | Sobyanin | Navalny | Ref |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 August–2 September | 60.1% | 21.9% | [15] |
| 22–28 August | 63.9% | 19.8% | [16] |
| 15–21 August | 62.5% | 20.3% | [17] |
| 8–14 August | 63.5% | 19.9% | [18] |
| 1–7 August | 74.6% | 15.0% | [18] |
| 25–31 July | 76.2% | 16.7% | [19] |
| 18–24 July | 76.6% | 15.7% | [20] |
| 11–16 July | 76.2% | 14.4% | [21] |
| 4–10 July | 78.5% | 10.7% | [21] |
| 27 June–3 July | 77.9% | 10.8% | [21] |
Between 2011 and 2013,a series of protests had swept across Russia against electoral fraud after the2011 Russian legislative election, and RPR-PARNAS had involved itself in theMoscow protest movement.[22] Using its recently regained official party status, the party nominated a key leader of the protests andopposition figureAlexei Navalny for the September2013 Moscow mayoral election, eliminating the need for Navalny to collect a huge number of signatures to be able to run.[22][23] Navalny waspresidentVladimir Putin's top critic, and analysts agreed that he had specifically been released from imprisonment and allowed to run in theKremlin-controlled election to give it a false sense of legitimacy.[23][24][25] The pro-Putin candidate,Sergey Sobyanin ofUnited Russia, even ordered the authorities to allow opposing parties to run against him, and personally requested that the Moscow municipal authorities helped Navalny collect the required number of signatures to run.[26][25] Despite this, during the campaign Navalny got only a quarter as manyTV mentions as his United Russia rival, mostly in the context of corruption charges against him.[27]
In July Navalny was only polling around 8% and Sobyanin 78%.[23] However, Navalny rapidly gained support at the expense of Sobyanin and did surprisingly well in the election, winning 27% of the vote and nearly forcing a run off against Sobyanin who, according to official results, only managed to win just over 50% of the votes.[22][27][24] Navalny and his supporters maintained that the authorities had altered the results just enough to allow Sobyanin to cross the 50% threshold and avoid a runoff, which would have been a dramatic setback for the establishment.[24]
In the aftermath of the election, Navalny was offered a position as the fourth co-chairman of RPR-PARNAS alongside Kasyanov,Boris Nemtsov andVladimir Ryzhkov.[28]
Despite the authorities banning the party from participating in some regions in the 2013 regional elections – likely for political reasons – RPR-PARNAS managed to achieve another electoral success in the autumn of 2013 when co-leader Nemtsov successfully managed to win a seat on theYaroslavl regional parliament.[22][29] Nemtsov's victory meant that the party won the right to run in state legislative elections without having to collect signatures, since it held a seat in one of Russia'sregional parliaments.[22] In turn, this made RPR-PARNAS the only "non-systemic"opposition party that had automatic access to the ballot in legislative elections.[22]
In the concurrent September 2013 gubernatorial elections, all of the party's candidates were disqualified from running by the authorities.[30]
It was in 2013 that Nemtsov also published a report on the upcoming2014 Winter Olympics which were planned to be held inSochi, Russia. He provided evidence there had been massive embezzlement by government officials, asserting that it amounted to about 50-60 percent of the stated final cost of the sporting event.[9]
_(Boris_Nemtsov).jpg)
One of the party's co-leaders at this time wasBoris Nemtsov, the party's most influential and talented mediator and a leading Russian opposition figure.[22][31] Nemtsov had been one of Russia's leading economic reformers in the 1990s and also served as first deputy prime minister under PresidentBoris Yeltsin.[31]Nemtsov was assassinated inMoscow on 28 February 2015, being shot by an attacker in a car while on a bridge by theKremlin.[31] He died hours after appealing for support for an upcoming protest in Moscow against thewar in Ukraine, and in a recent interview, Nemtsov had said he feared presidentPutin would have him killed because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine.[31]UkrainianpresidentPetro Poroshenko described Nemtsov as "a bridge between Ukraine and Russia" and added "the murderers' shot has destroyed it. I think it is not by accident".[31]
In the aftermath of the assassination, Kasyanov stated that he also feared for his life, noting that he was receiving death threats fromnationalists.[32] On this, he commented: "The authorities want to stop my political activity with threats, they want to force me out of the country. Their aim is to frighten me. But I have decided that I am going to continue with my activity."[32]
Nemtsov's murder deprived RPR-PARNAS of one of its most influential figures and meant he was unable to complete his term as an elected member of the Yaroslavl regional parliament, the party's last remaining seat. However, because of the 5-year mandate Nemtsov won in 2013, the party would retain control of the seatuntil 2018.[22]
In July 2015, the party congress voted to shorten the party's name to just People's Freedom Party (PARNAS).[33] In April 2015 a number of opposition parties formed a unified Democratic Coalition to take part in the2016 legislative election, as well as the 2015 regional elections as a test. This included PARNAS, as well as theProgress Party ofAlexei Navalny, the Democratic Choice party ofVladimir Milov, as well as several others. The unregistered movements needed to band with PARNAS as they were rejected from the right to take part in elections as the necessary signatures they collected were deemed invalid, while PARNAS was officially registered as they still held the seat in theYaroslavl Oblast Duma that had been won byBoris Nemtsov in 2013. In 2015, the coalition focused on four regions where their candidates were accepted by theCentral Election Commission—Novosibirsk,Kaluga,Kostroma, andMagadan.[34] However, in all these regions the party was harassed while campaigning, its members were arrested in Kostroma, and it was eventually denied the possibility of running its party candidates for assembly seats in Novosibirsk and Kaluga as regional election commissions and courts ruled its voter petition signatures invalid.[35] They were only allowed to run in the Kostroma region in the end, where official results gave them 2.28% of the vote, not enough to obtain a seat in the regional legislature.[36]
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Three months after Nemtsov was assassinated another leading figure in the party,Vladimir Kara-Murza, was nearly killedafter being poisoned.[37] Kara-Murza had been elected to the federal council of the party in June 2012, and was also elected to theRussian Opposition Coordination Council in October 2012.[38][39] While in a meeting, Kara-Murza fell severely ill and began vomiting violently, eventually losing consciousness and falling into acoma.[37] He was taken to hospital and spent a week in the coma.[37] When he woke up he was told by doctors he had been poisoned by an unknown substance, and tests subsequently found high levels of heavy metals in his blood.[37][40]
Kara-Murza's poisoning was widely believed to bepolitically motivated.[41] Kara-Murza had been a close friend of Nemtsov, and there was a history of the Russian security services poisoning opponents of theKremlin, such asAlexander Litvinenko andAnna Politkovskaya.[42] Kara-Murza would bepoisoned again in February 2017, again causing him to fall into a coma, but he also survived this attack.[41]
In 2021, it was discovered that Kara-Murza had been trailed before his poisonings by the sameFederal Security Service unit thatpoisoned the most prominent Russian opposition leaderAlexei Navalny in 2020.[43] Navalny had previously been RPR-PARNAS's candidate for mayor in the2013 Moscow mayoral election and worked closely with the party.
After his recovery, Kara-Murza went on to be elected deputy leader of RPR-PARNAS in July.[44]
Ultimately, the primary that was held to create the candidate list that would run for the coalition in the elections ended up breaking down, for multiple reasons. One key reason was the publication of a sex tape involving Mikhail Kasyanov and another PARNAS member, which causedAlexei Navalny andIlya Yashin to call for Kasyanov to take part in the primaries himself rather than be permitted to be automatically placed on the candidate list (Kasyanov's position on the party ticket was part of the agreement in forming the coalition).State-run TV channelNTV also released a secretly-recorded video of Kasyanov criticising his coalition partners in private.[45] Members of the "December 5" party proposed to hold a vote to decide whether the reserved spots on the party ticket should exist or not, and while the others supported the idea, PARNAS vetoed it.[46] When Kasyanov refused to take part in the primaries they pulled their support, effectively ending the coalition. Yashin and several of his supporters also left the party.[22]
PARNAS went on to hold its own primary but this was disrupted when hackers posted the personal information of voters who took part in it online. Unexpectedly,ultranationalistpopulistVyacheslav Maltsev became the frontrunner of the primary, but the hacked information revealed that many of the voting accounts had the same passwords, suggesting that someone had been using bots to inflate the votes of select candidates. Kasyanov refused to step down after the debacle and stood in the 2016 elections,[47] in which the party gained 0.7% of the vote and not a single seat in the7th State Duma.[48] The party had faced significant challenges in some regions, with the press rejecting the party's ads and local TV stations blocking their candidates from TV appearances, despite this being mandated by law.[49]
In December 2016 deputy party leader Kara-Murza left PARNAS because of Maltsev's role in the party.[50]
During the2017 Moscow municipal election, PARNAS partnered with the liberal partyYabloko in a coalition called 'United Democrats' to get candidates elected to local councils of deputies in municipal districts of Moscow. Specifically, PARNAS only gained two out of 1,502 seats up for election, but the coalition as a whole obtained over 260 seats.[51]
In October 2017, Kasyanov proposed that the liberal opposition candidates intending to run for thepresidency in 2018—includingGrigory Yavlinsky,Alexei Navalny, andKseniya Sobchak—form a coalition and field a single candidate in order to increase their chances.[52] In early December PARNAS revealed that this coalition was never formed and announced that they supported the three opposition candidates, so the party did not have any of its own candidates run for the presidency.[53]
In September 2018 regional elections were held in which the party's only seat in a legislature, theYaroslavl regional parliament, was up for re-election.[22] The seat had originally been won by party co-chairBoris Nemtsov in 2013, before he wasassassinated in 2015.[22] In August 2018 the party attempted to register their candidates for the election in Yaroslavl, but pro-Putin partiesPatriots of Russia and theLiberal Democratic Party challenged the PARNAS party ticket in court claiming their candidates list violated certain regulations — a common tactic used by the authorities to bar the opposition from elections.[22][27] In late August the Yarslavl Regional Court denied PARNAS the right to run in the election, and, after an appeal by the party, theRussian Supreme Court upheld this decision on 7 September.[22] The decision meant that the party were condemned to losing their last seat, meaning that the party lost the right to automatically run inState Duma legislative elections.[22]
The party was dissolved by Russia'sSupreme Court on May 25, 2023 because it did not have the required number of branches and due to claims filed against existing branches by theFederal Taxation Service and theMinistry of Justice.[6][7] The Supreme Court cited the absence of the party’s offices in at least half of the 83federal subjects of Russia as the primary reason.[54] The Ministry of Justice claimed that the party’s number of branches had dropped from 47 to 40 since the start of 2023.[54] PARNAS claimed the party still had 44 offices and that it could not have offices in thefour annexed territories of Ukraine by Russia on 30 September 2022 (who areinternationally recognized as a part ofUkraine[55]), since (PARNAS alleged) those regions did not yet have full-fledged executive authorities.[54]
The ideology of the RPR-PARNAS was liberalism, federalism and human rights.[citation needed] In his interview, Kasyanov said "there is no higher value for the government than human rights." He defined ideological stance of PRP-PARNAS asright-of-center liberalism.[56]
The main principles of the PARNAS party program included securing the individual rights of Russian citizens and equality of all before law, and that thegovernment should be democratic, controlled by the public and should serve the interest of the people. The party condemned theBolsheviks who seized power in 1917 and the existence of theSoviet Union, which it considered tyrannical, and modeled itself after theConstitutional Democratic Party that existed during the lateRussian Empire. It also promised to declassify allKGB and other Soviet documents as part of a "decommunization" program and ban all promotion of the communist regime. For Russia's form of government it proposed to create aparliamentary republic and increase local self-governance. In addition, PARNAS wanted to reform the judiciary to be truly independent, remove government control over the mass media, and promote small business and entrepreneurs over oligarchs.[57]
The party considered the2014 Russian annexation of Crimea illegal and vowed to return control ofCrimea back toUkraine; as such, PARNAS did not campaign in Crimea in the2016 Russian parliamentary elections.[58] According to its 2015 election platform, it stated that it wanted Russia to become a partner ofNATO and theEuropean Union, as well as to end military interventions in other countries.[59]
In Russia,political opposition during Putin's presidency tends to be more visible throughprotest than in legislatures and executive offices.[60] The main three 'opposition' parties in parliament, often referred to as the 'systemic opposition', do not represent a serious threat to the government and dominant ruling partyUnited Russia.[27] TheCommunist Party has declined in strength since the 1990s and also supportsUnited Russia on various issues, while thefar-rightLDPR and socialistA Just Russia — Patriots — For Truth parties, both believed to begovernment creations, largely supportPresident Putin and the government.[27][60][61] Most of the major parties fully support the president, and only the liberalYabloko andPARNAS parties strongly condemn Putin's policies.[61] Thus, the most prominentdemocratic opposition parties in Russia have been Yabloko and PARNAS.[60][62] Experts consider these parties to be the two political forces that are true opposition parties, and they were the only two parties out of the 14 that competed in the2016 legislative election that could be considered as such.[63]
When in 2012 new laws were introduced which allowed the formation of new parties, several new opposition parties sprang up, but RPR-PARNAS held an advantage over these other parties as it was led by several long-standing leaders of anti-Putin opposition such as Nemtsov and Kasyanov. This gave the party particular prominence.[29]
Yabloko and PARNAS are generally more politicized than the 'systemic opposition', leading campaigns againstelectoral fraud andcorruption while voicing support forcivil rights.[62] Both frequently demand the release ofpolitical prisoners,media freedoms, and changes in political regulations, and have advocated direct elections of mayors and opposed oppressive legislation such as laws and restrictions on public meetings.[62]
Amongst all parties, Yabloko and PARNAS have had the highest percentage of ballot-access denials by authorities, despite their overall limited number of attempts to register candidates.[64]
Bureau:
Others:
| Election | Party leader | Performance | Rank | Government | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Votes | % | ± pp | Seats | +/– | ||||
| 1993 | Run into theYabloko andChoice of Russia lists | 12 / 450 | New | 6th | Opposition | |||
| 1995 | Ella Pamfilova | 1,106,812 | 1.69% | New | 2 / 450 |  10 | 12th | Opposition |
| 1999 | Only constituencies | 1 / 450 | 1 | 15th | Opposition | |||
| 2003 | Did not contest | |||||||
| 2007 | ||||||||
| 2011 | Party was part ofFor Russia without Lawlessness and Corruption coalition that boycotted the elections | |||||||
| 2016 | Mikhail Kasyanov | 384,675 | 0.73% |  0.73 | 0 / 450 |  0 | 11th | Extra-parliamentary |
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