Municipal elections have shown that the United Russia Party is more of a liability than an asset for candidates.
Last Monday morning first Deputy Head of the President's Executive Office, Vladislav Surkov, looked at the results of the elections held the day before, on March 1, and immediately summoned the Chief of the Internal Policy Directorate, Oleg Govorun. Their talk lasted almost 40 minutes, whereupon Mr Govorun summoned his deputy Alexander Kharichev, who was the Kremlin man appointed to supervise elections in the regions, and told him that he was fired. "Mr Surkov fired Mr Kharichev for a number reasons, but mainly over the election results," a Kremlin source says.
The elections passed off without incidents, the system is working, Mr Surkov later said. Indeed, United Russia won comfortably all the elections to the regional parliaments. However, the spin doctors close to the Kremlin noted with some glee that if the system was indeed working successfully, Kremlin officials wouldn't get fired. The Communists won 49% of the votes in elections for the Tver City Duma to United Russia's 29%. Mr Kharichev was sacked mainly over Tver, a Kremlin source says.
Actually, the United Russia has problems. The March 1 vote demonstrated that Prime Minister Putin's party is losing popularity in regional capitals and cities and towns all over the country: in the Urals, in the Far East, in the Volga area and in Central Russia. Support for United Russia has always been greater in rural areas than in the cities. However, the latest elections revealed a new picture: The party, when left alone to face the people began to lose out. Without massive television support at the national level United Russia is becoming an assemblage of bureaucrats who bear the blame for the current economic problems. Most alternative candidates who won the city elections are former or even current members of the United Russia. But they won on criticism of the United Russia. Here and there official candidates even tried to conceal their affiliation with the United Russia. The party in its present shape is more hindrance than help, at least at the local level, political analysts claim.
NEW TACTICS
The initial plan was that the Party would win this election itself, without the Kremlin's help. As late as the autumn, Vladislav Surkov made this arrangement with the Secretary of the UR Political Council Presidium Vyacheslav Volodin, the chief party functionary. It seemed to be a feasible task in spite of the crisis: The governors were in control of the situation in the regions and Vladimir Putin's approval rating was still high. The party campaigned under Mr Putin's flag. "The Putin Plan is a Victory for Tomsk", the billboards in Tomsk declared. "One in every two citizens here has a higher education, a Tomsk expert shrugs. Why a victory for Tomsk? This is ridiculous."
A source close to the UR staff says that no viable campaign headquarters had been set up; instead, there were the so-called groups, which gathered once a week to review how things were going in the regions. During the 2007 election campaign, the Party bombarded the regional executive committees with detailed instructions regulating everything from concrete dates of events to the texts of slogans and posters. Not this time. Instead of instructions, beginning from January the head office has been mailing to the regions a general ideological paper and a special bulletin titled "The Logic of Power".
The ideological tips were in the form of questions and answers designed to help the party's candidates. Who is to blame for the crisis? Answer: the United States, the Wall Street capitalists, greedy oligarchs, who were "buying yachts and English football clubs" and "various administration parasites" steeped in corruption. Why is the dollar growing stronger and the euro and the rouble are growing weaker? Because the dollar is the world reserve currency, but that is a temporary phenomenon; in fact, it is only worth "the paper it is printed on". What will the United Russia do? It won't sit on its hands. The time has come to put this country in order. Does Russia have enemies? Yes, they are those who "pillage the country", those who "buy new villas while leaving thousands of families without a livelihood".
The special election bulletin has a section called "Critique of Popular Misconceptions". What does one tell those who believe that the President should sack the Government? That this is an "overt advocacy of breaking the tandem" and a conspiracy to toppleMr Putin with President Medvedev's hands and then take the latter under control and weaken him. "We did not provide the creative content, but [Vladislav] Surkov has seen it and approved it," Newsweek's source at the Kremlin said last week. At any rate, the methodological campaign materials were approved at the Kremlin.
BREAKING RANKS
The campaign plan did not work. It was already clear in early February that there would be problems. "There are opinion leaders in the regions who have broken ranks, entrepreneurs with political ambitions and semi-establishment politicians," a member of the Kremlin Executive Office was saying in February. They became the Party's main rivals. Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev did not pay much attention to the elections, but the Kremlin stepped in: Kremlin supervisors headed for the regions in mid-February to improve the situation. But even that did not make an impact everywhere.
In Tomsk, the editor of the local opposition newspaper Tomskaya Nedelya, Alexander Deyev, unexpectedly made it to the second round. His campaign slogan was "Give a Failing Mark to the Mayor's Office". Experts in Tomsk believe that if the Mayor, Nikolai Nikolaichuk, a UR member, had campaigned separately from his party and simply tried to project an image of an efficient mayor, he would have won in the first round. Governor Viktor Kress supported Mr Nikolaichuk in the second round and the City Duma deputies called on the voters "to rally around the Governor of the Tomsk Region, Viktor Kress, who has a confidence vote from the President and the Russian Government." If Mr Deyev wins, Mr Kress will be sacked, the people of Tomsk believe.
In national elections people readily vote for United Russia, but its rating doesn't add much to the popularity of individual candidates, a Tomsk expert reports. People in all the regions say that the UR's campaign was lackluster. Even in Chelyabinsk, for example, where the opposition was routed, the party owed 80% of its victory to the Mayor's team, says Artyom Perekhrist, Director of the Urals Analytical Centre. Not all the official candidates used party symbols in their campaign there.
Protest sentiments are mounting and any candidate from another party, be it the LDPR or the KPRF, would easily win 5%, a political advisor working in the regional elections claims. He says that it has become a kind of business: "You declare that you run for office, issue a couple of leaflets for three kopecks, and then, after bargaining with United Russia, withdraw your candidacy". This is democracy, experts smile. The outcome of the Tomsk elections is touch-and-go. In Murmansk the former Deputy Governor Sergei Subbotin has about the same chances as the incumbent mayor Mikhail Savchenko.
In Togliatti City Duma elections the local opposition movement Dekabr unexpectedly won 25% of the vote and the UR just 39%. The United Russia used last year's slogan "Putin's Plan is Russia's Victory". They also thought up a new one: "Keep the Good Things, Create Better Things". "It could have been worse [than 39%]," says Vladimir Zvonovsky, a local political scientist. Dekabr made a breakthrough because it has a popular leader, the regional deputy Sergei Andreyev. In the previous election of the Togliatti Mayor he was disqualified and "these protest votes have materialised now," Mr Zvonovsky says.
The city of Severodvinsk near Murmansk decided to play it safe: Only the UR candidate and an obscure pensioner who had filed a lawsuit that led to the disqualification of all the other candidates contested the election. Last Thursday President Medvedev requested the head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov, to brief him on the past elections, and to submit data on who was prevented from running or disqualified after registration and for what reasons. It has never happened before. Part of the problem is that the country's leadership needs to make up its mind on what policy to pursue in the context of the crisis: To try to rally everyone around the UR or to allow all the establishment parties to fight it out.
TIGHTENING THE SCREWS
The day when the Kremlin official, Mr Kharichev, was sacked, the party declared a convincing victory in the editorial of the special bulletin "The Logic of Power" distributed to the regions. "The United Russia has won because the attempt to set Mr Putin's and Mr Medvedev's electorate against each other failed," wrote the party spin doctors. "The wave of post-crisis attacks on the Medvedev-Putin tandem has been stemmed", the party's bulletin claimed. On Friday the party's general council made an official review of the election results. It declared the elections to be "successful" and "the successful elections... to be convincing support by the Russian citizens of the validity of the course pursued by the President... and the Prime Minister."
Newsweek's sources at the Kremlin are wondering what the elections had to do with the Putin-Medvedev tandem: All the problems in the elections were local." The idea that the regional elections signified a victory of the tandem most probably emanated from Vladislav Surkov, and was handed down to the party. The materials for the victory bulletin, a source at the UR says, had been prepared, gathered and edited in advance, even before the results were announced. Last week, even before the General Council meeting, the United Russia sacked some local party leaders.
Neither Mr Putin nor Mr Medvedev will conduct post mortem analysis, a Kremlin source is sure. Neither of them had anything to do with this campaign. Local candidates had no assistance from Moscow, apart from the visits by Kremlin curators in February, and even the latter did not have a coordinated policy. That played into the hands of the independent candidates, experts say. The persons who are supposed to decide whether to tighten or loosen the screws, are delaying the decision," Newsweek's source at the Kremlin says.
On present form the next elections in October may give a rough ride to United Russia. It's the same old scheme at work: Elites unite to form a party and use the Governor's clout. In the future it will be less and less effective because of the mounting protest sentiments," says political scientist Alexander Kinev. Newsweek's sources at the Kremlin and at the White House predict social unrest in late summer and early autumn. Then the question of controlling elections and regional policies will come to the fore. "Screws will be tightened. It will be made inevitable by the instinct of political self-preservation," a Kremlin official says.
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PROTEST SENTIMENTS are mounting: Any candidate from the LDPR or the KPRF could easily win 5% or more of the votes.
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"MARCH 1 ELECTIONS WERE A SUCCESS," the United Russia declared.
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THE SYSTEM WORKS, but the Party, left to face the electorate, has started losing out.
Pavel Gusev, Konstantin Sedakov