a meeting, Kara-Murza fell severely ill and began vomiting violently, eventually losing consciousness and falling into a coma. He was taken to hospital and spent a week in the coma. When he woke up he was told by doctors he had been poisoned by an unknown substance, and tests subsequently found high levels of heavy metals in his blood. Kara-Murza's poisoning was widely believed to be politically motivated. Kara-Murza had been a close friend of Nemtsov, and there was a history of the Russian security services poisoning opponents of the Kremlin, such as Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya. Kara-Murza would be poisoned again in February 2017, again causing him to fall into a coma, but he also survived this attack. In 2021, it was discovered that Kara-Murza had been trailed before his poisonings by the same Federal Security Service unit that poisoned the most prominent Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020. Navalny had previously been RPR-PARNAS's candidate for mayor in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election and worked closely with the party. After his recovery, Kara-Murza went on to be elected deputy leader of RPR-PARNAS in July. Democratic Coalition and sabotaged 2016 legislative election campaign Ultimately, the primary that was held to create the candidate list that would run for the coalition in the elections ended up breaking down, for multiple reasons. One key reason was the publication of a sex tape involving Mikhail Kasyanov and another PARNAS member, which caused Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin to call for Kasyanov to take part in the primaries himself rather than be permitted to be automatically placed on the candidate list (Kasyanov's position on the party ticket was part of the agreement in forming the coalition). State-run TV channel NTV also released a secretly-recorded video of Kasyanov criticising his coalition partners in private. Members of the "December 5" party proposed to hold a vote to decide whether the reserved spots on the party ticket should exist or not, and while the others supported the idea, PARNAS vetoed it. When Kasyanov refused to take part in the primaries they pulled their support, effectively ending the coalition. Yashin and several of his supporters also left the party. PARNAS went on to hold its own primary but this was disrupted when hackers posted the personal information of voters who took part in it online. Unexpectedly, ultranationalist populist Vyacheslav Maltsev became the frontrunner of the primary,