‘If the Powers that Be Don’t Need the Party of Power, Why Do Russian Voters?’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 15 – The collapse in public support for United Russia has caused Moscow to allow ever more candidates at the regional level to run at least nominally as independents, Andrey Pertsev says; but that tactical response is creating additional problems not only for United Russia but for Vladimir Putin’s power vertical.

            As public approval for United Russia has tanked, the Presidential Administration has responded by modifying the system Vladislav Surkov put in place and allowing ever more people to run for regional parliaments or even governors, the Moscow analyst writes in a commentary for the Carnegie Moscow Center (carnegie.ru/commentary/78548).

            The authorities in Moscow have hoped that they can control who these independent candidates are and thus gain the electoral outcomes the Kremlin prefers; but, Perzev argues, the status of an independent allows these candidates to behave differently than Moscow would like even if the center thinks it controls them.

            When such candidates to regional offices are asked about issues which are the province of the central government like pension reform, they can say, as those nominated by United Russia cannot, that they are not responsible for such decisions and that voters should focus on local issues in their campaigns rather than on all-Russian ones.   

            Such responses not only intensify regional differences but further undermine United Russia in the first instance and the other “systemic” parties as well because the latter too can’t discipline “independent” candidates and force them to support the party line. All this is corrosive of the power vertical.

            “The powers that be are trying to solve the problem of declining popularity by tactic means and thus destroying their own political infrastructure and harming above all their very own party,” Pertsev says. The center may believe it can count on independents it helps select, but the forces working against Moscow is this regard are strong.

            The situation has changed, and candidates who don’t want to work with United Russia become deputies who won’t work with it. After all, “if the powers that be don’t need the party of power, then why do voters” or candidates elected by them “need it? Especially because the United Russia people do not have a clear ideology.”

            Moreover, and as a result, he continues, “the interests of the regional authorities and Untied Russia are beginning to diverge. The governor needs a loyal majority in his legislative assembly and United Russia is a large fraction. In the past, this was one and the same thing, but now it isn’t.”

            Indeed, if the governor tries to use United Russia as a base, he may very quickly alienate others on whom he needs to rely.  At the same time, “the other systemic parties are also suffering. Earlier, they could attract sponsors [for their candidates] far more easily than they can now,” given that sponsors can shift their backing to more pliant independents.

            All this is working to destroy the system Vladislav Surkov put in place when he was running domestic politics for the Kremlin. He worked to drive the most prominent regional politicians into the party of power in order to improve predictability and management of the country as a whole.

            That system guaranteed the Kremlin the results it wanted, “but with today’s problems, [this system] clearly cannot cope.  However, the center is not putting anything new in its place but only acting in ways that further destabilize its old construction.” It does not appear to have any idea what to do strategically and so acts only tactically.

            But without a strategy, each of the Kremlin’s tactical steps is creating ever more problems for the regime, a trend that points to disaster for the system on which Vladimir Putin thought he could rely forever in the not too distant future, Pertsev suggests.