In the 1990 elections for the Russian Supreme Soviet, the Communist Party faced challengers from an alliance of liberalisers known as "Democratic Russia"; the latter did particularly well in urban centers. Yeltsin was elected the parliament's chair, something Gorbachev was unhappy about. That year, opinion polls showed Yeltsin overtaking Gorbachev as the most popular politician in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev struggled to understand Yeltsin's growing popularity, commenting: "he drinks like a fish... he's inarticulate, he comes up with the devil knows what, he's like a worn-out record." The Russian Supreme Soviet was now out of Gorbachev's control; in June 1990, it declared that in the Russian Republic, its laws took precedence over those of the Soviet central government. Amid a growth in Russian nationalist sentiment, Gorbachev had reluctantly allowed the formation of a Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as a branch of the larger Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev attended its first congress in June, but soon found it dominated by hardliners who opposed his reformist stance.