Nezavisimaya Gazeta: “Putin's approval rating: The best hope of United Russia”
The next interregional conference of United Russia, which Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will attend, is to be held in the Volga Federal District in September. It will be held shortly before regional elections, which the party thinks it must win even though they will be the most difficult elections for the party.
Analysts say Putin and his party correctly understand current trends, which suggest that Russian politics is gradually moving to the local and municipal levels.
United Russia has decided to radically change its attitude towards preparations for the third regional conference. According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta sources, the conference will be held in the Volga Federal District in September.
The party held its first mini congress, attended by Putin, in April in Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk, the capital cities of two large regions in the Siberian Federal District. The second conference was held in Nalchik and Kislovodsk in the North Caucasus Federal District.
These were trial conferences, during which the party searched for the most promising issues and the best ways to address them. They wanted to discuss possible technology for selecting the best regional development projects that can be implemented within the two years left before federal elections.
The third conference is clearly expected to produce more palpable results, because it will be held at the height of the campaign for the October elections. This newspaper has written before that United Russia will focus on municipal elections in that campaign.
United Russia usually wins regional elections. Even if its candidates get only 40% of the vote when the party expects to get 60%, it still has a majority in regional legislatures by convincing the winners in single-candidate electorate districts to take its side.
But municipal elections are another matter altogether. The party sometimes loses them to its opponents. The October elections will be held in several capital cities in the Volga Federal District. The municipal legislatures will be elected in Nizhni Novgorod, Orenburg, Kazan and Cheboksary.
The battle is expected to be especially difficult in Samara, where the city legislature and the mayor will be elected. United Russia candidate Dmitry Azarov, the Samara Region's minister of natural resources, forestry and environmental protection, will compete against the current city mayor, Viktor Tarkhov, a candidate of A Just Russia.
United Russia has not yet decided in which of these cities its conference will be held. It may be held in two cities like the second conference. So, the third conference is likely to be held in Samara and Nizhni Novgorod, although Putin will visit only one of the cities.
The situation in these cities was discussed at a special meeting of United Russia's election staff last week.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the head of the presidium of the party's general council, who chaired the meeting, told NG that they would establish a permanent centre to select promising regional development projects. This process was not used at the previous conferences.
The first results of the selection could be announced in late August. In the last ten days of the month, a preliminary selection of investment development projects for the Volga Federal District will be held at the Plekhanov Academy of Economics in Moscow within the framework of United Russia's interregional conference. The best projects will be included in the Strategy of Socio-Economic Development of the Volga Area through 2020 and the Programme for 2010-2012, to be submitted to Putin at the party's mini congress in September.
United Russia believes that Putin's prestige and the fact that people living in the Volga district will be able to address the prime minister directly will improve its chances at the October elections.
These events will benefit not only United Russia but also Putin. Few people know that the prime minister is also working hard to select the best projects. Mini congresses are a good way to inform the general public about his efforts.
Dmitry Badovsky, deputy director of the Social Systems Institute, said political work at the municipal level is becoming increasingly important. "The most challenging elections are in the cities and they attract more attention from voters," he said. "This is logical, as people don't live in regions but in cities and villages, where their interests are focused, including the question of the quality of life. It is therefore not surprising that political parties are now trying to work harder at the municipal level."
Badovsky said the prime minister had to manually control the economy during the crisis, visiting meetings at local enterprises and other events in many cities. According to the analyst, Putin has gradually come to the conclusion that Russian politics is becoming increasingly localised.
"When fighting the consequences of the crisis, he acted strictly in compliance with this nascent trend," Badovsky said.
In this sense, Untied Russia is following in the wake of its leader.
Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Centre for Political Technologies, supports the view that Untied Russia wins all of the regional elections but the situation at the municipal elections is less predictable.
"We have seen this in Bratsk and Irkutsk [where Untied Russia lost the mayoral elections to Communist Party candidates]," Makarkin said. "The electorate in the regions' capital cities is less controllable. United Russia needs to prove that its defeat in Irkutsk is an exception rather than the rule."
The analyst said that if United Russia loses the elections in other regional capitals, everyone will start talking about a trend, which is undesirable. This is why the party of power wants to use, for the first time ever, one of its main resources – the prestige of the prime minister – during the mayoral elections in the Volga area.
Elina Bilevskaya
