Anti-putin mayor to quit over election law

YEVGENY ROIZMAN, a critic of the Kremlin who is rare in the sense he had a senior regional job in Russia, said yesterday that he is resigning as mayor of Yekaterinburg after authorities moved to scrap elections in the Fifa World Cup host city.

Lawmakers voted last month to abolish direct mayoral elections in the city which is 900 miles east of Moscow, proposing instead that mayors be chosen by local legislators from a shortlist drawn up by a special commission.

“I don’t want be part of this and I am resigning,” Roizman told the local legislature.

Mr Roizman, a charismatic opposition politician who narrowly beat a Kremlin-backed candidate in the mayoral race in 2013, had been due as chairman of the legislature to put the scrapping of elections to lawmakers for a final vote yesterday.

Instead, he told lawmakers he refused to “legitimise someone else’s decision” and pronounced the session closed, video of his speech shared online showed.

Mr Roizman has been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin and the pro-kremlin governor of the Sverdlovsk region, in which Yekaterinburg lies.

As mayor, Mr Roizman has regularly attended demonstrations organised by Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who was barred from running in the March presidential election, when Mr Putin won a fresh six-year term.

Leonid Volkov, an opposition politician from Yekaterinburg, said Mr Roizman’s resignation had obstructed the passage of the election legislation, but that it was unlikely to stop direct elections being scrapped eventually.

“This political act and civic deed will, however, remain in history,” Mr Volkov wrote on social media.

The idea of scrapping direct elections was proposed by Yevgeny Kuivashev, the Sverdlovsk regional governor. His allies had argued that doing away with a ballot would save money and streamline decision making.

Last month, just under 2,000 people demonstrated against the proposal, demanding direct elections be kept and that the governor should resign.

Yekaterinburg, a city of 1.4million in the industrial belt of the Ural Mountains, is hosting Egypt and Uruguay in their first-round matches at the World Cup next month.