Barred as a Party, Still on the Ballot: Yabloko's Narrow Race for the Duma
Around a dozen candidates linked to Yabloko are running in Russia's September 2026 election for the 450-seat State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament. The vote is held over three days and centered on September 20, 2026. The Straits Times
The party itself cannot compete. Russia's Supreme Court barred the liberal Yabloko party from contesting the parliamentary elections. Reuters The ruling was published on August 10, 2026. Reporting from September 16, 2026, still lists around a dozen affiliated candidates in the field.
Yabloko's website had set out a national plan before the ruling. It said the party would run under the slogan "Za mir i svobodu!" (For peace and freedom!). Yabloko The site also posted a voting guide called "Plan B" for the September 20, 2026 elections. Both pages were current on May 7, 2026.
The label has a long history. The New York Times covered its candidates on November 15, 1999, in In Russian Campaign, Candidates Crowd the Low Road. A Times reference page from December 17, 1999, called YABLOKO a long-established reformist opposition consistently credited with 8 or 9 percent in polls. The New York Times The Times also published 1995 Duma results that list Yabloko figures. The New York Times Those figures are from the 1990s.
The broader context here is exclusion paired with persistence. A ban on a party would normally end its campaign. Here it has not removed every Yabloko-linked name. What remains is narrower competition by individuals in districts rather than by a national party list, like runners entered singly after their team was disqualified.
In my view, the points to watch are practical. A slogan from May and a guide called "Plan B" suggest a group preparing voters for limited choices. A dozen candidacies in a 450-seat chamber cannot change the arithmetic. They can keep the label visible, test what district officials will permit, and give sympathetic voters a place to register a preference. For specialists, the September vote is less a test of Yabloko's poll strength than a test of how much space remains for that opposition identity when the party vehicle is disqualified.
