Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 10 – Gubernatorial
elections to take place in seven Russian federal subjects on September 18 and
voting for regional parliaments in 38 of them the same day are so much under
the control of the powers that be that the results are “just as predictable as
when the regional leaders were in fact appointed by Moscow,” Vadim Shtepa says.
On the Forbes.ru portal, the
Karelian regionalist now living in exile in Estonia argues that “the
appointment of governors,” introduced by Vladimir Putin after the Beslan
tragedy, “led to a radical alienation of the regional authorities from the
interests of local residents” (forbes.ru/mneniya/vertikal/327685-nedovybory-nedogubernatorov-pochemu-v-rossii-ne-slozhilas-federatsiya).
Even before that
happened in 2004, he says, Russia’s federation was “from the outset built on an
imperial model,” with the two subjects identified in the Federation Agreement
of 1992 identified as “’the center’” and “’the regions,’” something that opened
the way for re-centralization and made the Russia a federation “in name only.”
Nonetheless, “if in the 1990s, no
governor could fail to take into consideration the opinions of electors knowing
that if he ignored them, he could ‘suffer’ in the next elections.” But “after 2004, the regional heads faced
only one single voter – the person sitting in the Kremlin.” Only his views mattered, and his success
depended on carrying out his orders.
When Putin agreed to the return of
elected governors in 2012, many thought that would give new life to Russian
federalism, but in fact, Shtepa points out, “these ‘returned’ elections were
already in principle different from those which took place in all federal
subjects in the period 1996 to 2004.”
Political parties and the ruling
United Russia Party in particular were now the gatekeepers and thus have acted
in exactly the same way Putin would have if he had been making the appointments
directly. And amendments to the law which
allowed Putin to “consult” which is to say “order” local officials only made
that clearer.
Chechnya, which Putin has called “a
model of federalism,” will elect its head, but given that Ramzan Kadyrov is the
head, that says it all. “Besides Chechnya, general gubernatorial elections this
year will take place in six other Russian Federation subjects – the republics
of Komi and Tyva, Tver, Tula and Ulyanovsk oblast, and Transbaikal kray.
“All the main candidates in these
regions,” Shtepa notes, “are at present fulfilling the obligations of governors,
are members of the United Russia Party, and are actively using its
administrative and propaganda resources.”
And all can be expected to win, although probably not with Kadyrov-like
percentages.
Four of the six governors outside of
Chechnya are “Vikings,” that is, officials without local ties. The exceptions
are in Tyva where the percentage of the titular nationality is so high that it
would be difficult to violate the norm and in Transbaikal kray where the
previous governor got in so much trouble.
The incumbents will win even though
United Russia is losing popularity because its supporters in the population
still vastly outnumber both the systemic opposition (KPRF, LDPR, and Just
Russia) not to speak of the extra-systemic which is increasingly being forced
out of electoral competitions.
Many felt that open “’unfiltered’”
gubernatorial elections in the 1990s led “only to the appearance of ‘regional
barons,’ who transformed the subjects of the Russian Federation into their own ‘estates,’
with the open domination by their own administrative and business groups,”
Shtepa says.
But those problems should have been
overcome by making the system more transparent and more democratic rather than
more centralized. Tragically, exactly the reverse has happened in large measure
because of “the personalist Russian tradition” which looks to the president in
the country as a whole and the governor in each region rather than to the
legislature.
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