Opposition Increasingly Winning Local Elections, Frightening the Kremlin, Sabirov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 16 – The Kremlin completely controls all-Russian elections, overwhelmingly does the same with regional ones, but is ever more frequently losing out at the municipal level, a pattern that threatens the center because as a result, ever more Russians will become conscious of their rights, Shamil Sabirov says.

            These opposition figures at the local level may not be linked to the all-Russian opposition parties, the IdelReal commentator says; but that does not make them any less threatening over the longer term. Voters who back them will in time find it easier to back other candidates opposed to the regime (idelreal.org/a/29546281.html).

                One of the reasons for this development, Sabirov continues, is that Moscow doesn’t view the municipalities as all that important. The center controls all the money flows – even the city of Kazan retains only seven percent of the taxes it collects – and therefore many in Moscow view the cities and towns as irrelevant to political power and thus unworthy of attention. 

                The contempt that Moscow officials have for such local levels of government is well-reflected in Chief Justice Valery Zorkin’s recent article about the constitution (rg.ru/2018/10/09/zorkin-nedostatki-v-konstitucii-mozhno-ustranit-tochechnymi-izmeneniiami.html) in which he proposes to dispense with local governments altogether.

            On the one hand, Zorkin’s proposal would lead to a further intensification of the hyper-centralization of the Putin system, concentrating even more power in the Presidential Administration. But on the other, it would require giving regions, either the current ones or 14 “super regions” greater authority so as to run things locally.

            But that carries with it the danger of increased regionalism, which, “when strengthened by the cooperation of the municipal-level opposition,” represents “a terrible challenge for the System as a whole,” Sabirov says, yet another way the reforms some in Moscow are now talking about may breed more serious problems for the center than those they’re supposed to fix.