Russia Profile
September 14, 2007
Russia Profile Weekly Experts Panel:
The Duma Campaign Begins
Introduced by Vladimir Frolov
Contributors: Stephen Blank, Eugene Kolesnikov, Andrei Seregin, Ira Straus
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that officially kick-started the election campaign for the fifth Russian State Duma.
The new Duma will be elected in accordance with new election rules introduced during Putin's second term. Among others, they include an election by party list only, a ban on political blocs, a higher 7 percent threshold for winning seats in the Duma, a ban on voting "against all candidates" and a raise in the minimal turn out requirement.
All those changes have been pushed through by the Kremlin with a view to creating a viable party system with political parties taking greater responsibility for the legislative agenda and even the executive branch of government.
Most polls show that the four parties currently in the Duma - United Russia, Just Russia, the Communist Party and LDPR - are likely to make it to the next Duma, although the LDPR's chances seem somewhat dicey at the moment.
United Russia is projected to receive no less than 47 percent of the vote and will retain its Duma majority of more than 225 seats, although the constitutional majority that it commands today appears to be unattainable. United Russia will only have a shot at a constitutional majority in the new Duma if Zhirinovsky's party fails to reach the 7 percent threshold.
United Russia boasts the most impressive lineup of politicians, and its political agenda is well within the center of the Russian political spectrum. The party, however clearly needs a facelift; its leader, Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov looks tired and stale while its second-tier leaders lack national recognition.
The Communist Party has been gradually reinventing itself as a loyal social-democratic opposition. It is projected to come in a strong second.
Just Russia has yet to prove its mettle and make the transition from a political project developed on the eve of the election to an entrenched national party with the capacity to shape a national political agenda and to legislate its political platform.
As for the LDPR, Vladimir Zhirinovsky has been bleeding oligarchs (Suleiman Kerimov) and pornographers (Alexei Mitrofanov) from his party ranks as its chances to make it to the new Duma appear to be sliding. However, he is still capable of rallying his unsophisticated supporters, and the Kremlin still values his loyal and inexpensive service. His party will compete with Just Russia for third place.
The liberal parties - the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko - are unlikely once again to make it into the Duma. SPS has a shot, since its new, younger leadership has engaged in blatant populism appealing to older left-leaning voters, making outlandish social spending promises that have nothing to do with liberal economic policies and that they have no intention of delivering.
The political forces that have refused to play by the new rules, like Gary Kasparov's United Civic Front, Mikhail Kasyanov's National Democratic Party or Dmitry Rogozin's Great Russia have been denied registration as political parties and cannot compete in the Duma elections. They appear to have no political future.
What does this new election promise for Russia and its further political and economic development? What will the impact be on Russia's democracy? How will it affect the presidential election in March 2008? Will Putin's successor run on a party list? How will Russia's new foreign policy figure in the election campaign? How will the campaign rhetoric affect Russia's relations with the West?
Andrei N. Seregin, Head of Research Dept., Imageland PR Agency, Moscow
One of the most interesting possible results of the coming Duma election may turn out to be the most striking: the inevitable weakening of the Kremlin's administrative influence on party politics and elections in Russia. In a certain sense, the election architects in Putin's entourage (willingly or not) have created the basis for a viable and stable democracy. After creating a largely mock opposition, the fractured Kremlin found it increasingly difficult to control. With the president standing aloof, the real competition between factions within the Kremlin paved the way for competition among local elites throughout the country.
Ironically, it seems, that competition between factions within the Kremlin does more good for Russian democracy than all opposition efforts combined (SPS and Yabloko as well as the right-wing nationalists of Great Russia). Indeed, any competition within the government for the notorious "administrative resources" makes it less convenient to use in an electoral campaign. This was clearly the fact in most Russian regions, where United Russia members headed almost every public executive office, but the United Russia membership still wasn't safe from conflicts among local elites. This is even more clearly the fact now that local political elites have another pro-government party option - Just Russia.
The first experience of party primaries in most Russia regions has turned out to be a failure. Due to the activities of local and federal authorities and party bosses, most final party lists will look significantly different from the primaries results. Still, the first step is the hardest and the precedent of having party primaries is set. That seems particularly important for the time when the balancing power of the president's popularity wanes. The interests of keeping political and social stability require local political elites to have at least one working option for creating regional party lists in a relatively just way.
Created to bust the Communist Party, Just Russia is itself in a scandalous mess now. It is losing political face even faster than gaining nationwide prominence, getting rid of many renowned people to give obscure party sponsors and fundraisers a desired place on the party list. The recent expulsions from the party lists of popular Duma deputies and local politicians show that the party has yet to overcome difficulties in shaping its national political agenda.
Russian voters increasingly see Just Russia as a weak sidekick of United Russia, loyal to the Kremlin, but with much less influence. To get rid of this image, Just Russia has launched a blatant populist campaign, stumbling its way forward.
Still, the main intrigue of the coming elections may not be the chances of the loyal Just Russia party, but rather the gains the Communists will make due to growing hostility between Just Russia and United Russia. This election may seem like a paradox - the Kremlin is widely thought to have created Just Russia to split the Communist electorate in order to promote United Russia's centrist agenda. Now that Just Russia has almost jumped on the social-democratic bandwagon, it may see a more lucrative option to crush its older sister. With United Russia clearly in need of a political facelift - it looks increasingly like the Soviet Communist Party -some healthy forces within United Russia may fall prey to political populism on the part of Just Russia contenders.
This is especially true in a number of Russian regions. As an example, early in September Just Russia joined with a faction of industrial leaders in the Samara region to undermine the position of local United Russia authorities, inspiring a strike on Russia's main automobile-making facility, AvtoVAZ, whose leaders backed the local United Russia branch.
Eugene Kolesnikov, Private Consultant, The Netherlands
The upcoming Duma elections are the first Duma elections in Russian history to take place in relatively stable socio-economic and political conditions. At last there is no sense of impending doom. Polls show that the majority of the Russian public is increasingly happy and confident about the futurea remarkable turnaround from the disenchanted and depressed population subjected to 15 years of lost hopes under perestroika and the so-called democratization of the 1990s. This new reality combined with the timely and decisive measures taken by the state have also effectively removed any threat of a destabilizing color revolution in Russia. Consequently, the elections will focus on real issues concerning the people and the state.
Another important aspect of this year's elections involves the consolidation of pro-Putin social democratic forces represented by Just Russia. The next parliament will have a systemic and constructive social democratic faction. Just Russia will also probably absorb the leftist but pro-Putin electorate from the Communists and the LDPR, thus reducing the antagonistic influence of the communist party and maybe even delivering a mortal blow to the populist and opportunistic LDPR. These changes will transform the Duma from a rubber stamp to a balance of power political body divided between centrists and social democrats. The next Duma therefore will be more responsive to the concerns of ordinary Russians, while still working on a largely pro-Putin reform agenda.
The Duma election campaign will help define and refine key issues that will effect the presidential elections and, more importantly, the course implemented in Russia over the next four years. The coming months will show what adjustments in this course are likely to take place.
These elections will also be a major step in the consolidation of the Russian party system into a 3-4 party configuration. Dwarf and extremist parties will be further marginalized. As a result, the future Russian political landscape will have little space for the libertarian politics so forcefully imposed on Russia by the West. This is definitely a significant achievement of the Kremlin reformers.
And finally, the international implications of the Duma elections in my view are twofold. Objectively, these elections will send a strong signal that the Russian electorate and political forces are firmly behind Putin's reform and no dramatic change of course is possible. This may play an important role in reconciliation of the West to the realities of new Russia, and could induce some positive adjustments in Western policies towards Russia. In reality, however, the reaction of the West may continue to be hostile. In my opinion, anti-Russian propaganda is likely to pick up steam. This will be a sign of protracted conflict and further implementation of Russia containment strategies, which the new Russian political establishment will have to address in its domestic and foreign policies.
Ira Straus, U.S. Coordinator, Committee on Russia in NATO, Washington, D.C.
Elections in the managed Russian political system are a depressing affair for commentary. The speculation on the current Duma campaign, while massive, has been in the manner of Kremlinological analysis. This means that everyone assumes Byzantine palace politics are the main thing going on, with electoral politics as a facade.
A cynical reader might take this to mean that we might as well move on to other subjects. The cynical reader would not be entirely mistaken.
Putinists and Russian diplomats had spoken in earlier years of the Japanese model of democracy, which had a hegemonic party that for several decades always won the elections. Instead, today's Russian system looks more like the old Mexican model: corrupt, authoritarian, personalistic. It had the same one-party hegemony alright, but no one - apart from the Mexican regime -pretended it was a democracy.
In the last Duma elections, independent vote counts, conducted largely by Communist Party workers, showed that Yabloko and SPS were each cheated out of about 1 percent of the vote. This meant Yabloko was almost certainly cheated out of the 5 percent of the votes it actually won and the entry into the Duma that would have gone along with that, and possibly SPS was too. The story was put out that Putin hadn't wanted the liberals to lose their Duma seats and the cheating was carried out by overzealous local officials, trying to fulfill Putinist quotas for the United Russia vote and doing it along the line of least resistance. Many Russian liberals and pro-Russian Westerners have tried to believe this explanation, but the evidence has kept getting worse. If it had really been a mistake, Putin could have easily seen to a recount and correction of the mistake. Soon regime-linked forces were discussing carving a dependent, regime-controlled, social-democratic party out of United Russia to replace SPS and Yabloko in the Russian political space. Then there has been the recurrent police and administrative harassment of Yabloko. And the raising of the barrier to Duma entry for small parties to just above the level that either Yabloko or SPS could ever be expected to reach.
It is not what should be found in a system of management that is moving toward democracy.
Already the victims are being blamed. SPS and Yabloko are blamed for not uniting. While I personally wish they would unite, even then they would even have no guarantee of reaching the new barrier and could easily be cheated out of it again anyway. Additionally, Russian political scientists have shown an inherent difficulty of uniting them without a net loss, given their differences in constituency. SPS, meanwhile, is being attacked as promising illiberal social spending to try to get past the barrier; in reality, many SPS people have long spoken in favor of social spending and were opposed to the monetization of benefits several years ago, which they described as "nomenklatura liberalism" reflecting the sensitivities only of the closed-off elites, who were freely helping themselves with a liberal dose of corruption. (The actual slogan of post-Communist liberalism, as expressed by the most honest Czech liberal party, the Civil Democratic league, was not to eliminate social welfare spending, but to separate it from production and allow an open market-based productive system.)
Of the parties expected to make it into the Duma in the present cycle, only the Communist Party is something like an authentic independent party. That is a sadly ironic fact: it inherits most of its brand name acceptance, entrenched apparatus, and mass nationwide membership not from its independent activity, but from its past monopoly use of administrative resources.
Politics does exist in a managed electoral system, but less in the elections than in other, Byzantine practices. In Gorbachev's time, the managed opening of the system could be understood by a combination of the old Kremlinological-style analysis, an increasing element of democratic (party and public opinion) analysis, and analysis of the process of democratization -guessing how far it would go, how long it would last, and whether it would be reversed. At present it requires all the same modes of analysis, but alas, in reverse.
Stephen Blank, The US Army War College, Carlyle Barracks, PA
(Dr. Blank's views as contributed to Russia Profile do not represent the position of the U.S. Army, Defense Department or the U.S. Government)
First, we should call a spade a spade and admit that this election is by no means a democratic one. It has been thoroughly engineered to provide the party system that the ruling elite wants. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that this will convince the West that Russia is moving toward democracy, or already is one. The opposite is more likely. As for foreign policy rhetoric, it is already clear that an enormous amount of media has been invested in exacerbating relations with Russia's neighbors, the West, in general and with organizations like the EU. If anything, this propaganda claiming that these powers are enemies of Russia is likely to continue as long as the regime believes that doing so mobilizes public support for them. As for the other questions posed in the introduction, I have no answer. Despite the pre-election rigging, we do not know yet how the elections to the Duma will turn out. Whether or not presidential candidates will run as the head of a party cannot be determined in advance of the election. However, doing so would be a reversal of recent practice since the historic mythology of the state and the head of state is that it and he incarnates the overall or general interest as opposed to parties that represent only a partial, sectorial, and parochial interest. Therefore there is something suspicious about parties insofar as a president is concerned. Indeed, even the Communist Party had to abandon its role as the leading party of the proletariat to legitimize itself. The new laws on parties might eventually lead, paradoxically, to a stable parliamentary situation in which fewer parties are larger and more able to aggregate different interests, but that will develop only over time. Given what has happened since Putin took power, to call these elections democratic represents merely a willful blindness or apology for an ever more repressive, corrupt, autocratic, and even violent regime.