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15.04.07
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In Russia, The Gray Vote Is Red-Brown
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Comment by Graham Stack
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The Kremlin isn’t Worried about the Liberal Opposition
Are the handful of protestors surrounded by Western TV cameras really the only opposition in Russia?
Krasnoyarsk region is regarded as Russia’s “New Hampshire” – a region that reflects the political composition of the country as a whole. So what does the outcome of last weekend’s regional vote in the region tell us? It was no surprise to anyone who the winner was – the pro-Putin party United Russia took 42.5% per cent of the vote, a very respectable result. But a closer look shows that three other parties took 44.5 percent between them – the Communist Party (20.3 percent), the notoriously nationalist LDPR (12.41 percent), and the newly-created Just Russia party (11.35 percent). And all three of these parties are united by their contempt for Putin’s conservative economic policy, and more fundamentally, of the very property structure the country was left with after the privatization of the 1990s. This means that, at least arithmetically, a majority of seats will go to parties opposed to Russia’s current direction – and this after eight years of powerful economic growth.
What this highlights is that there is powerful structural opposition in Russia to fundamental aspects of government policy. This opposition has a demographic characteristic: Its bulwark comprises the pensioners. This group, who has lost the most and has the longest memory, makes up the most active part of the voting population. Such opposition is papered over by economic growth, Putin’s personal popularity and media control. But it is worth considering what might happen if the economy stalls once Putin has departed.
Such considerations have prompted the Kremlin to take preemptive action, organizing its very own party to appeal to these disgruntled voters: Just Russia. The party aims to siphon votes away from the communists and nationalists, using a smattering of populist slogans criticising the government, and targeting pensioners’ votes. At the same time, Just Russia is led by a Putin loyalist, and openly proclaims its fealty to the president. After the elections, it is expected that the party will forget its radicalism and side with United Russia on crucial questions of the day. But the party’s current platform makes clear exactly whom the Kremlin regards as opposition.
The wider context of such maneuvering is the planned shift to a party-based system for regional and national parliaments. A whole raft of measures – including party-list only elections increasing transparency, higher entry barriers for national parties forcing them to unify and consolidate and a significant increase in state financing for parties – are part of the Kremlin’s program to bolster parties as nationwide political actors. Democracy simply does not work without the strong parties taken for granted in the West, and especially not in a sprawling federal state like Russia.
Having learned from the mistakes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the current administration has generally taken flanking measures to prevent proposed reforms from undermining their political power base. Asked recently about Russian political parties, Putin stated that in Russia there is one and only one party in the country that has a household brand, clear ideology, mass membership and well-developed infrastructure: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. His aide Vladislav Surkov has also stated that shifting to a multi-party system in the regions and Duma will benefit above all others the Communist Party. Hence the precautionary measure: the “oppositional” Just Russia.
The “liberal opposition,” is the only opposition recognized by the West, but the two established liberal parties, the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko, are highly unpopular. Neither party passed the 5 percent hurdle to enter the Duma in 2003. In a case unique in political history, this complete failure to enter parliament proved to be a springboard to achieving higher office: Putin publicly regretted their relegation, promised to draw on their cadres and made good on his promise. Three current Yabloko members and one former member currently hold top posts in the Putin administration. Two founding members of SPS have been entrusted with running and reforming the crucial electricity and nuclear power sectors.
And so the chimera of the “liberal opposition” starts to fade since even apart from these card-carrying liberals, a whole swathe of policy makers in the Putin administration have impeccable liberal credentials, while no member of the Communist or nationalist parties has held office under Putin.
Far from the Kremlin fearing liberals, the Kremlin fears the anti-liberal, Soviet-nostalgic inclinations of a significant section of the electorate, particularly when attempting to strengthen the role of parties in political life, and seeks pro-actively to control, divide and tame them. In doing so, they are currently receiving help from unexpected quarters: From radical democrats, often referred to as dissidents with reference to the tiny numbers they mobilize, who, outside of all party structures, and with no popular support in Russia, pursue confrontational politics for their target audience in the West. At the end of a week in which Boris Berezovsky and the U.S. State Department declared their intention to forcefully intervene in the Russian electoral process, the applause these protests receive in the West and the police harassment they meet with in Russia, usefully allow the Putin administration to disassociate itself in the electorate’s eyes from any suspicion of pursuing pro-Western policies, and thus, paradoxically, to strengthen the real chances of pursuing reform. |
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