Kommersant: "Opposition: "Putin’s report on election programme"
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's report to the Duma yesterday seemed more like a presidential election programme than an annual report to the government.
The view was shared by all the Duma's parliamentary factions with the exception of United Russia, whose members believe their party leader held a professional conversation about the country's post-crisis development. They argue that even if Putin did in fact pay more attention to social issues, he only did so because Russia is a social state according to the Constitution.
Leader of the Liberal Democratic Party's parliamentary faction Igor Lebedev told Kommersant that Putin's speech sounded nothing like a report.
Both in length, as the prime minister spoke for over two hours without a break, and in content, the speech sounded like a presidential address to the Federal Assembly, Lebedev said. Just as the president did in his address, Putin "made a brief analysis of the present state of affairs and set forth objectives for the near future," he added.
Lebedev believes the tasks that Putin set forth in his address are nearly the same as those President Dmitry Medvedev addresses in his speeches – "modernisation, innovation and high technology."
"Putin did not allow himself to make any political accents or slogans," leader of the Just Russia party's parliamentary faction Nikolay Levichev told Kommersant.
He noted the prime minister's attitude toward the speeches of parliamentary faction heads when they went beyond a discussion of strictly economic issues.
Putin did not react in any way to Levichev's remark on the "bad practice of appointing city managers" that has replaced "the right to elect local government" or to Communist Party leader Gennady Zuyganov's request to take care and to look into those in the staff of the Presidential Administration who brought up the issue of de-Stalinisation of the country.
Levichev added that by listening to the report between the lines, it becomes quite clear that the government drafted the report "with a view to the Duma elections this year and the presidential elections next year."
"The figures have been cherry-picked to paint a nice picture," he said. Thus, Putin promised that student stipends would increase by 9% instead of the planned 6.5%, but "this is a difference of 100 roubles that does not matter much for students."
Oksana Dmitriyeva, Levichev's deputy in the Duma, said the same applies to the promised 30% increase in the salaries of public sector employees. She recalled that the salaries were last adjusted for inflation in 2008, so the promised increase will simply cover the losses that they have sustained over the past three years.
At the same time, Coordinator of the Communist Party's parliamentary faction Sergey Reshulsky said the report's figures and promises are far less significant than the "plans for the future, up to 2015 and even 2025."
In his opinion, the report contains a detailed analysis of successes, but "makes no mention of setbacks and their underlying reasons."
Reshulsky is convinced that Putin spoke as a presidential nominee.
Meanwhile, Vice Speaker Ivan Melnikov of the Communist Party told Kommersant that Putin "focused on patriotic rhetoric with a flair of leftist sentiments," referring to statements about the need to raise the prestige of workers' professions, and the importance of pushing a new wave of industrialisation and investing 10 billion roubles from oil and gas revenues in promoting development. He used to say similar statements in the early 2000s.
However, Yevgeny Fyodorov, the head of the Duma Committee on Economic Policy and a United Russia member, described Putin's report as "a professional conversation about the country's post-crisis development."
"The plans for the future are quite logical in the report because it is impossible to plan life today without planning guidelines for the years ahead," he said.
Moreover, Fyodorov does not see any election plans in the prime minister's emphasis on social issues.
"Supporting people is routine work for the government because our country is a social state according to the Constitution," he said.
Viktor Khamrayev
