In Russia, Yabloko candidate barred from running over a song — The Moscow Times
In Russia, an aggressor state, the Supreme Court of the Udmurt Republic removed politician Iya Boronina from the State Duma elections over the use of the song Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood & The Destroyers in campaign videos. The court ruled that this violated Russian intellectual property law, The Moscow Times reports.
The lawsuit was filed by a representative of the A Just Russia party. According to the Kommersant newspaper, the plaintiff stated that Boronina could not legally purchase a license for the track because it can only be paid for in U.S. dollars, while a candidate's election account does not allow such transactions. Boronina's appeal was rejected. She said the court considered the case without her participation and did not notify her of the date and time of the hearing.
Yabloko candidates
Boronina became one of dozens of opposition candidates removed from the State Duma elections scheduled for September 18–20. Of them, 29 represented the liberal Yabloko party, and four, including Boronina, head regional branches of the political force.
Last month, the Supreme Court excluded Yabloko from the nationwide party list. The party may nominate candidates in single-member districts, but as of Thursday, 106 of its candidates in 45 regions remained in the race, compared with 135 at the start of the campaign.
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In regional elections, Yabloko candidates will be able to participate in only one of 39 elections to legislative bodies. Courts in seven regions removed party lists. According to Vyorstka, the most common grounds for disqualification were old posts mentioning Alexei Navalny, featuring his photographs, or linking to projects associated with him. Other cited reasons included holding shares on foreign exchanges, a post featuring a caricature of Adolf Hitler, and errors in registration documents.
In Tomsk Oblast, a court barred the party from participating in elections to the regional parliament over alleged violations of campaign financing rules, copyright law, and the use of banned social platforms.
Pressure on communists
According to Vyorstka, at least eight candidates from the Communist Party were removed from State Duma or regional parliament elections. The most widely publicized case was the removal of former regional deputy from Saratov Nikolai Bondarenko, who has more than 2 million YouTube subscribers, from the race. The formal reason was an old social media post featuring a photograph of Navalny.
András Tóth-Czifra, an expert on Russia's domestic politics and political economy, linked the removal of Yabloko representatives to reduced opportunities for protest voting and the suppression of turnout. In his assessment, pressure on Communist candidates was less coordinated.
