#13 - JRL 2009-214 - JRL Home
Analysts ponder on development of One Russia
Interfax
St Petersburg, 20 November: One Russia may become a "party of the past" if it does not win the "conflict of strategies", believe political analysts, participants in the media forum that opened on Friday(20 November) in St Petersburg within the One Russia eleventh forum.
"If One Russia continues the current tactics, there is a huge risk that it will become a party of the past that is incapable of working with modern groups," said Valeriy Fedorov, head of the VTsIOM (All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion), speaking within the "open discussion" at the forum.
He said that on 11 October, on the single voting day, VTsIOM held a sociological experiment, an electronic exit poll of a kind. VTsIOM asked Muscovites to send text messages saying how they had voted, Fedorov said. It emerged that 45 per cent voted in favour of One Russia (against the official results of 66 per cent) and 17 per cent voted for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (compared to the official 13 per cent), Fedorov said. "Another three parties overcame the 7-per-cent hurdle," Fedorov states.
The results show "what our political system may become after a couple of election cycles", he said.
Political analyst Gleb Pavlovskiy who also took part in the discussion believed that Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev practically had put an end to the former strategic course; he "threw up a conflict", the essence of which was that the old strategy conducted by former President Vladimir Putin was over. "A certain state in out political development has come to an end," Pavlovskiy said.
"This is a strategy in accordance with which I used to work. We have done the most of it and we have defended the country, we have saved it from disintegration. But this is an old epoch and the president is drawing the line," he said.
Meanwhile, he went on to say, Putin is a "leader of a consolidated majority, self-confident and triumphant majority". However, Pavlovskiy believes, today this majority will have to enter a "political conflict" with those are set on modernization, that of the country's political system among others. It is this option of development that has been offered by the head of state, he says.
Director-general of the Centre of Current Political Situation Aleksey Chesnakov named "enemies of modernization " who are trying to waffle away the new way of the country's development, offered by the president. One can identify three groups of these enemies, he said. The first group is comprised of "part of bureaucracy", the second is comprised of "entrepreneurs who do not undertake anything" and the third one - by the "Russian scientific class, the Russian Academy of Sciences". "It is time to put an end to the existence of this layer of blood-sucking people who are only waiting for favours from the budget and do not offer anything instead," Chesnakov said. (Passage omitted)
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