United Russia re-elects PM Medvedev as leader

RT.COM/23 Jan, 2017 -  Dmitry Medvedev has been reelected as chairman of parliamentary majority party United Russia. Other senior leaders of the party also retained their posts and State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin joined its Supreme Council.   

Boris Gryzlov was re-elected as head of United Russia’s Supreme Council and Sergey Neverov remains as chairman of its General Council. Former State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin, who currently heads Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), remains in the Supreme Council.   
In his speech before the party congress, Medvedev called United Russia “the president’s main political resource” and emphasized the importance developing the party’s regional branches. To facilitate this, he proposed increasing the representation of regional groups in the General Council from the current 20 percent up to 30 percent.   

He also announced plans to increase the number of United Russia grassroots-level organizations to make it the same as the total number of Russia’s electoral constituencies. “This would allow us to send monitors to every ballot station and, through this, to make the polls cleaner,” Medvedev said.