The speaker of the State Duma for the past eight years, leader of the ruling United Russia party and perhaps Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s most loyal ally, Boris Gryzlov, said Wednesday that he is quitting his job in the parliament.
“Today I made a decision to give up my seat,” Gryzlov said, adding that he would stay on as chairman of the Supreme Council of the ruling United Russia party.
The party struggled to hang onto its parliamentary majority in the December 4 parliamentary election, despite widespread allegations of fraud.
Political analysts said Wednesday that Gryzlov’s removal is part of the Putin’s effort to bring new faces into public politics and to facilitate a rotation of senior officials in the ruling party that quickly is quickly bleeding off popular support, as the latest vote has demonstrated.
Putin – who heads United Russia and is this party’s candidate for the presidential elections in March – is also trying to distance himself from the party before the March vote, the analysts said.
Meanwhile, another old-time Putin’s ally, Irkutsk governor Dmitry Mezentsev, threw his hat into the ring Wednesday to run as a candidate in the March 2012 presidential elections. Political analysts said his bid aims to ensure that Putin participates in legitimate elections.
Mezentsev worked along with Putin in St. Petersburg City Hall in the 1990s.
The 52-year-old governor said the nomination by a local trade union of railroad workers was "an unexpected decision" for him, but has accepted the challenge. Russian Railways state corporation is headed by another of Putin’s long-time personal friends, Vladimir Yakunin.
Russian political scientists say that though Mezentsev is not a member of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, he was neither an independent nor an opposition candidate and his nomination is aimed at preventing possible election disruptions by the opposition.
He would stay in the race if all other candidates decide to drop out of it, the analysts said. Under the Russian law, elections with just one candidate are not valid.
Also, the number of the aspiring presidential candidates swelled by one more man Wednesday, in addition to Mezentsev, as a Russian radical opposition leader and controversial writer Eduard Limonov applied for registration as an independent presidential candidate on Wednesday.
Limonov, the head of the unregistered Other Russia party, submitted to the Central Election Commission his formal request for registration as a candidate, as well as documents attesting that he was nominated by an action group of at least 500 people.
Both Mezentsev and Limonov will have to collect two million signatures in their support until mid-January in order to be registered as candidates.
Also on Wednesday, public activists protesting against the alleged vote rigging during the Dec. 4 Duma vote have been allowed to hold a 50,000-strong rally on Saturday, December 24 on Sakharov Avenue northeast from Moscow’s Garden Ring. The rally is supposed to be a follow-up to the similar massive gathering of protesters in central Moscow last Saturday, in which between 25,000 and 40,000 people participated, according to the estimates by Moscow police and organizers of that rally, respectively.
