The St. Petersburg electoral commission refused on 24 July to register the list of the liberal opposition party Yabloko for the city legislative assembly elections scheduled for 20 September. The commission ruled that the party’s first financial report had not been legally submitted because the representative who signed it lacked explicit authorisation in his power of attorney—a defect it termed “irremediable.” The decision removes the only major anti-war and pro-peace political force from the ballot in Russia’s second-largest city, while the lists of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, the loyalist Greens, and the systemic opposition parties CPRF, A Just Russia, and New People were registered without comparable obstacles.

Yabloko officials rejected the reasoning as artificial and politically driven. They argued that the power of attorney, which used the word “including,” was not exhaustive and that all documents had been filed in full—a point they said was confirmed by the commission’s own acknowledgment of receipt. The party also protested that the registration question was added to the commission’s agenda orally at the last moment, preventing proper scrutiny, and that earlier, territorial commissions had mysteriously “lost” candidate documents. Yabloko’s federal chairman, Nikolai Rybakov, had asked the Central Election Commission chair, Ella Pamfilova, to intervene hours before the vote, signalling that the party anticipated the denial. Yabloko has vowed to challenge the decision in court.

The St. Petersburg setback exemplifies a broader campaign of administrative and legal pressure on opposition candidates. On the same day, a Yabloko candidate in Kaliningrad was arrested and sentenced to 10 days for displaying logos of Meta-owned social networks without a legally required disclaimer—a charge that disqualifies him from running for one year. Party figures say more than 20 candidates nationally have faced similar charges, often for sharing images of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In parallel, the Central Election Commission announced it had found new errors in the federal registration documents of the Green Party, giving it two days to fix mistakes such as misspelled surnames and employment discrepancies, though that party’s St. Petersburg list was registered smoothly. Analysts in Moscow note that the selective enforcement of documentary rules allows authorities to filter out undesired contenders without formally banning parties.

A comparable dynamic is unfolding in Germany, where the interior ministry of Lower Saxony recommended that the election committee in the district of Friesland exclude AfD candidate Martin Sichert from a local election. The ministry cited security assessments that classify the AfD’s state branch as right-wing extremist, but constitutional law experts, such as Professor Volker Boehme-Neßler of the University of Oldenburg, argue that membership in a party that has not been banned cannot by itself demonstrate a lack of loyalty to the constitution, and that Sichert’s polemical statements on migration and government policy are protected by freedom of expression. The committee followed the ministry’s advice, though its own independence was called into question when the chairman initially described the ministry’s recommendation as a “decision.” Viewed from Berlin, the case fuels debate over the proper boundary between militant democracy and electoral exclusion.

Yabloko’s appeal in St. Petersburg will test whether the Russian courts provide a remedy, while in Germany, Sichert’s legal options remain open. The two episodes, though distinct in political context, illustrate how electoral commissions can become gatekeepers that shape the scope of political competition, often leaving opposition forces to claim that the real contest is waged not at the ballot box but in the back offices of election administration.