No quick return to election of governors, says senior Russian minister
Interfax
June 17, 2008
A senior Russian minister has said that there will be no return to the direct election of regional governors, Russian news agencies reported on 17 June. Regional Development Minister Dmitriy Kozak was commenting on the idea voiced several days earlier by Mintimer Shaymiyev, the long-serving president of the Russian constituent republic of Tatarstan.
"We have opted for this system, and it works OK," Interfax quoted Kozak saying. He was referring to the current system, introduced by the then President Vladimir Putin in 2004, under which regional governors are nominated by the president and then approved by the local legislature. Until then, governors had been directly elected by voters in the regions. "How many times can one sway one way and then the other - one system today, another tomorrow? Let us live with just one system for a while," Kozak said, according to Interfax.
RIA Novosti news agency said Kozak's comments came after a ministry conference on regional policy. "One cannot change the system of government every year," the agency quoted him as saying.
Another Interfax report quoted Russian upper house speaker Sergey Mironov as saying that "it will be possible to consider a return to the election of governors at some stage. But I do not think that stage has come yet." "I always believed, and still do, that the president did the right thing by changing the system of lection of governors in order to make the law on local government work more effectively," Mironov added. He did, however, say that the appointment of governors was, "after all, a temporary measure".
On 16 June, Interfax quoted a statement by Andrey Isayev, a senior official in the dominant pro-Putin One Russia party, released by the party's information centre. "We do not envisage changes to existing legislation on this issue for at least the next decade," the statement said. Noting that Shaymiyev was a co-chairman of the Higher Council of One Russia, Isayev said: "We respect his view regarding the procedure for empowering heads of regions and the president's right to dissolve representative bodies of constituent parts of the Russian Federation. However, his view is not the view of our entire party." Speaking at the Russian press forum on 14 June, Shaymiyev also suggested that the Russian president's right to dissolve regional parliaments should be revoked.