Nezavisimaya Gazeta: “Nation Shows Less Interest in President’s Address”
Viktoria Kruchinina
Experts say that the Russian President's state-of-the-nation address met with smaller interest than before, and blame this on the financial crisis.
A majority of Russians say they did not listen to President Medvedev's first state-of-the-nation address. During his presidency, now-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's were much more popular.
According to a poll of the All-Russia Public Opinion Study Centre (VTsIOM), only 17% of respondents closely followed the address, while 40% listened only to occasional passages and 14% said they were above politics as a matter of principle. 20% of those who followed said the address was encouraging, while 22% remarked that the President said the correct things, but that they had been said before and were unproductive. Indicatively, a mere 2% said they disapproved of all of Mr Medvedev's ideas.
The address to the Federal Assembly interested mainly the older generation. 56% of respondents above 60 years of age showed an active interest - 30% of them listened attentively and 26% heard a summary in news updates.
Political convictions mattered a great deal in the perception of the address. Of those who paid it no attention at all, Communists made the smallest minority, 33%-as opposed to 43% among members and sympathisers of the ruling party, United Russia (though those who listened said it "was inspiring and evoked hope").
This is how analysts explain subsiding public interest.
Alexei Makarkin, the deputy director of the Centre for Political Technologies, says that the address was televised during office hours: "People don't listen to bosses talking while they work." He added that the public-at-large becomes politically minded only in hard times. "People are still unaware of the crisis-everyone hopes something will turn up." This is also the reason for the absence of mass disapproval of the address: "On the whole, the nation relies on Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin's policies, and thus does not go into details. This will change as soon as people feel affected by problems in domestic policies or finances."
So the public feels safe, to an extent, and thinks the crisis has not reached Russia yet. Why, then, is the interest in presidential addresses subsiding? 32% of respondents had no idea the President was speaking even during the calm of 2006, during Mr Putin's presidency, and 42% in pre-crisis 2007. Now, 46% did not listen to President Medvedev's address.
Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Centre for Elite Studies, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that Mr Putin was certainly more popular than Mr Medvedev. "This might be why people turned a deaf ear to the November address."
