Real Devil in the Public Power Law is in the Details, Shaburov Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 14 – The process of constructing what Moscow calls “the vertical of public power” is not yet completed, Aleksey Shaburov says. On the one hand, the full impact of the new public power law on the regions will only become obvious with time. And on the other, a future law on local self-administration likely will be at least as Procrustean.

            The Yekaterinburg political analyst says the real threats from the law on the regions are not the things that have attracted the most attention but rather other new rules that will strangle all aspects of political life outside of Moscow (politsovet.ru/72503-vse-vertikalnee-i-vertikalnee-chto-novyy-zakon-o-publichnoy-vlasti-izmenit-v-regionah.html).

            As so often happens, the devil is in the details, Shaburov suggests. And the 290-page law is full of many that may not have immediate consequences but that will destroy what remains of federalism and local control, allowing Moscow to do whatever it likes regardless of what the residents and elites in the federal subjects want.

            In a commentary for his Politsovet portal, the analyst focuses not on the elimination of titles other than “head” for regional leaders and on their possibility to remain in office more or less forever as long as they stay in Putin’s good graces, given that he is in a position to remove them at any time.

            Instead, Shaburov points to the new law’s provisions that make such heads federal as well as regional officials, give Moscow the right to appoint a broad swath of regional officials, and eliminate the right of the residents of a region or republic to recall the head of their federal subject, a right they have not used but whose loss is symbolically important.

            He also points to the expansion of the powers of regional heads over those of municipalities, something that extends the power vertical pattern ever deeper into Russian life. But that new gubernatorial power may be meaningless, Shaburov says, because it is clear “the central power wants to interfere” in relations between cities and oblasts.

With regard to legislative assemblies at the regional level, the only positive thing in the new law is that they still can call themselves whatever they like. But the law now allows regions to move away from party list voting, tightens and standardizes rules on meetings between legislators and their voters, and allows the Russian president to prorogue these assemblies.

The president can do so if the assemblies adopt a measure that the Russian courts view as unconstitutional and fail to reverse themselves when challenged by the Kremlin. In short, Shaburov makes clear, Moscow now has an effective veto enshrined by law against any action any region or republic might take.