MOSCOW - Sergei Mitrokhin, the leader of the Yabloko party, is skeptical about presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov's plans to build a popular political party, which the latter declared earlier on Tuesday.
"It will be possible to establish parties numbering 500 people soon [if amendments to the law on political parties proposed by President Dmitry Medvedev are adopted by the parliament]. In these conditions, it would be hard to outnumber the ruling party. And besides, it is more important now to think not about the number but about the quality of followers," Mitrokhin told Interfax.
He also suggested that a party to be set up by Prokhorov could in fact be a Kremlin project. "I do not rule out that this party would be the Kremlin’s puppet. This could be something like a new edition of Right Cause," he said.
It is also important what Prokhorov does as a politician following the March 4 presidential elections, Mitrokhin said. "He could well phase out his political activities after the upcoming presidential elections," he said.
Another opposition politician and the leader of the unregistered party The Other Russia, Eduard Limonov, was also skeptical about Prokhorov’s chances to set up a new liberal party.
"He is a businessman and doesn’t imagine how difficult this is. He thinks he can put together a huge conglomerate for money, but this is an illusion," Limonov told Interfax on Tuesday.
"It takes a long time to set up a party. He does have ambitions, that’s for sure. He may have good intentions, but we have seen already what a mess he got into with Right Cause. He doesn’t seem to understand well what he is up to. A party is not an enterprise or a corporation but something different. You can set up an armchair party for half a year for money, but this won’t be a political party," he said.
Prokhorov announced earlier on Tuesday that he decided to start building his own party without waiting for the outcome of the presidential elections.
