The founder Russian liberal opposition party Yabloko, Grigory Yavlinsky, told reporters on Friday he expects the presidential elections to take place earlier than currently scheduled and that he hopes to win them.
The founder Russian liberal opposition party Yabloko, Grigory Yavlinsky, told reporters on Friday he expects the presidential elections to take place earlier than currently scheduled and that he hopes to win them.
Yavlinsky said the fact that Putin's approval rating currently exceeds 80 percent “plays no role", The Moscow Times informs.
“I make this conclusion precisely because Vladimir Putin’s rating is exceptionally high today. From my point of view, the situation in economy looks so bad that, in a year, early elections could become a reality – Putin will want to have the elections ahead of term in order not to wait for the situation to deteriorate further … So far, he has never held elections in the situation of downward trends,” Yavlinsky told reporters.
According to RT, the Yabloko founder also rejected any possibility that the situation in the country would improve before 2018, saying that this could happen only if Russia “returned” the Crimean Republic to Ukraine and stopped supporting the self-proclaimed republics in Donbass.
