Vladimir Putin will for the first time report to the State Duma today. The deputies will not risk assessing the Prime Minister's speech, but will support his programme
Along with the deputies, the Prime Minister's speech to the State Duma will be heard by all the 25 Deputy Prime Ministers and Ministers except those who are on leave or away on business, said the Prime Minister's press secretary Dmitry Peskov. The Prime Minister's speech and answers to questions will take two to two and a half hours, says Mr Peskov. The report itself will take about an hour. In it the Prime Minister is going to speak about the Government's work during the past year and the anti-crisis package, amendments to the budget and answer 12 questions from the parliamentary parties (three from each), which had been sent to him last week.
Mr Putin will then take questions from the floor (also three from each party), make concluding remarks and leave. He is not planning to be present during the discussion of his report, his press secretary says.
The procedure of Government report to the State Duma was proposed by President Dmitry Medvedev and was written into the Constitution in December 2008.
The meeting is not supposed to give marks to the Government's report. Most probably the Prime Minister's speech will be mentioned in a resolution approving the Government's anti-crisis measures, which will probably say that the Duma "has taken note of the Government's report", says Yevgeny Fyodorov, Chairman of the Duma Economic Policy Committee. The same resolution is likely to encourage amendments to the anti-crisis measures proposed. The resolution will not give a direct assessment of the Government's report, Oksana Dmitriyeva of A Just Russia has confirmed.
After the report the deputies should think which parts of it to agree with, which parts to reject, which parts to look at more closely, says Viktor Ilyukhin, a Communist Party member. Otherwise, it cannot be called a report. He said the KPRF is going to vote against the anti-crisis measures because they are "the consequences of a distorted economy". Gennady Zyuganov (the leader of every parliamentary party will have the floor after the report) will again put forward his proposals for overcoming the crisis.
The LDPR will ask Mr Putin what the Government was going to do about the prices of petrol, which are not falling as fast as the price of oil, the parliamentary LDPR leader Igor Lebedev said. The deputies are going to ask the Prime Minister why Russia proved to be unprepared for the crisis, why the money allocated for anti-crisis measures was misspent and whether the Government is going to respond to President Medvedev's call to downsize the civil service.
A Just Russia will ask about the pension reform, innovation and the policy in support of children, Ms Dmitriyeva said. No clear directives are likely to be given to the deputies on how to vote on the anti-crisis measures, the deputy added: The resolution is innocuous, but A Just Russia disagrees with many points of the anti-crisis programme because it does not spur the economy towards innovation and leans heavily towards supporting the banking sector rather than businesses.