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RIA Novosti
May 16, 2005
WILL RUSSIA AVOID A PARTY OLIGARCHY?

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Yury Filippov). Vladimir Putin is set to sign into law a new draft law on elections to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

The crux of the document is the replacement of the current "majority-proportional" election principle (based on single-mandate constituencies and party lists) with a strictly proportional one, where nationwide political parties alone will be allowed to fight Duma elections. Following the abolition of single-mandate constituencies, where voters have the chance to choose exactly who will represent their region, independent candidates will be left out in the cold. Moreover, the law will ban election campaign blocs, which, apart from parties, included public movements and organizations in the past.

Accordingly, the law provides parties with the exclusive rights to form the legislative (representative) branch of federal power and enables them to retain the status of national election corporations.

This new system has its advantages. In particular, it encourages parties to evolve into national public and political institutions that have a clearly defined niche and functions in public life. The main concerns are whether the Russian political market will prove competitive and capable of developing with the advent of several serious players that have all but monopoly rights. In other words, there is a risk that the present limited political competition may be replaced with strict party oligarchy that fails to identify and express major public interests.

The most radical criticism of the law is that it cannot be implemented until "proper" political parties are formed in Russia with their own stable electorate, and recognizable programs that enjoy public support.

Russia has seen only very modest progress in this area. Firstly, no influential Social-Democratic party emerged in the wake of Soviet Communist Party's collapse despite the country's long-standing socialist and social-democratic traditions. Today's Communists decided against becoming Social Democrats and now go to extremes time and again in an immature attempt to combine revolutionary Marxism-Leninism with the tenets of traditional Orthodoxy. The Homeland bloc, the big news at the 2003 Duma elections, promised to embark on social-democratic transformations, but instead began splitting into hostile groups drifting toward populist nationalism without a hint of "orange," much unlike its counterparts in Ukraine.

Secondly, the right-wing liberals, who made an impressive start under Boris Yeltsin, have lost the crucial part of voters due to their clumsy reforms and failure to find a common language with the people. Today, Russia's liberals not only have to make do without a Duma faction, but are also quite skeptical about their chances of negotiating the new 7% share of the vote (instead of the previous 5%) that parties have to win to take up seats in the Duma.

Thirdly, the centrist pro-presidential party, United Russia, which has an absolute constitutional majority in parliament, has focused too much effort on supporting the president. It, therefore, has failed to create its own individual political image or a clear program that every party member could support and the public could recognize. United Russia combines politicians with right- and left-wing views, liberals and conservatives. This is reminiscent of the late Soviet Communist Party, whose central bodies included future Russian liberals and organizers of "the orange revolution" in Ukraine working side by side with future participants in the failed 1991 coup (when Communists and KGB officers attempted to overthrow the Gorbachev government) and current president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, the "father of all Turkmens".

On the other hand, these three obviously unfavorable circumstances for a competitive multi-party system (i.e., the lack of Social Democrats on the left wing, weakness of the liberals on the right wing, and vague universality of the center) should not be seen as an obstacle on the way to "the new Russian multi-party system" for a number of reasons. Firstly, if the government continues to await party development at the grass roots level like in the 1990s, it will never live to see it. Secondly, a delay will mean the further bureaucratic consolidation of United Russia. The latter secured the constitutional majority in the Duma because most candidates who won in single-mandate constituencies discarded their own political views and joined the party to use it later as an instrument for lobbying. If this practice is not ended in due time, promising politicians will soon stop joining the opposition, making multi-party development in Russia a challenging task.

The new election system will produce its first tangible results at the next parliamentary elections in December 2007. The opposition parties have two and a half years to pull themselves together and consider their place in Russia's political and state system, and ways of securing it. The election reform will not be a success unless the opposition, both right and left wings, intensifies its activity. Under no circumstances should the reform be confined to strengthening the party of power, in this case United Russia.

In a sense, the reform should allow each of the parties running for parliament, receiving deputy mandates and then starting the legislative process, to become the party of power to some extent. Then Russia will be able to advance toward a competitive multi-party political system and avoid a party oligarchy, just as it once avoided the monopoly of the Soviet Communists.