Director General of the Center for Current Politics Mikhail Vinogradov
The conclave between Vladimir Putin and United Russia deputies on June 28 marked the middle of the election campaign and indicated the results of the political parties competition in the first six months of 2007. The results were rather successful for the United Russia. Several months ago it seemed that two parties of the power would knock together in the final battle – the general election – United Russia and Just Russia. However, the rating of the Just Russia failed to grow substantially, whereas the United Russia got very close to the 50% mark (some analysts claim the party has already overcome this). Besides, Putin’s criticism of leftist slogans showed that the power is in no mood to compete with the opposition promising the earth to voters. The president’s suggestion that the UR should take up the housing sector and thus gave the party an opportunity to make news and boost its image.
It would seem that all this finally cleared what the general election will be like. Parties’ ratings do not differ greatly from the election results, voters are quite predictable and it seems that the general election is inferior in significance to the presidential race. However, this is only at first sight. The intrigues around the State Duma election shows that the mechanical scenario is not the only possible scenario. In the mean time, many people sympathize with the power but consider elections uninteresting way to express their will against the background of the more “modern” and “cool” rallies and meetings near embassies and other attention gaining stunts. If the incumbent power fails to expand and refresh its base, the future president will fail to win support from the publicity in the future and face uncontrolled bureaucracy one-on-one. Naturally, this will bury all modernization projects.
The general election’s weak point is the reputation of insignificant election comparing to the presidential race. Having realized this, political parties started trying to boost the general election image. United Russia keeps a spot in the first three of its general election ticket vacant. Sergei Mironov says his party is expecting Vladimir Putin to announce the “successor” before deciding to support a presidential candidate. SPS is sure to join: it will be good for the rightist party to say that the main decisions will be made after the general election and will depend mainly on whether the party manages to get into the parliament. A part of the Kremlin-disloyal opposition echoes: they says it is possible that after the parliament election the constitution might be changed to abolish election of the head of state by general voting.
There are plenty of reasons for the parliament to be jealous of the presidential race. They fear that the president candidates will use the most popular and understandable ideas and the parties will be left with only those concepts that the president candidates’ HQs discarded. But these are the parties’ interests. In the mean time, the majority of the potential president candidates, whose names are currently buzz words, are not in any parties. There is no tradition in the history of presidential Russia to tie oneself with commitments with parties on the eve of presidential race.
The significance of the parliament election has always been underestimated in Russia – after all, the Constitution written in 1993 has it that the parliament is secondary to the executive power. But still Duma election results always act as an indicator for the political elite. LDPR’s victory in 1993 led to the layoffs of Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fyodorov, the communists’ victory in 1995 was followed by the ousters of Anatoly Chubais, Andrei Kozyrev, and Sergei Filatov. In 1999, the quick success of the Unity killed the Fatherland – All Russia bloc. In 2003, the impressive performance by the United Russia made it possible to fire Mikhail Kasyanov and hire an oversea employee - Mikhail Fradkov.
Source: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, July 2, 2007
