Russia May Soon Move Toward a Two-Party Model, Zemskova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 4 – The September Duma elections are unlikely to bring any serious surprises in the party composition of the Russian parliament, Elena Zemskova says; but rumors are swirling that the Kremlin, on the one hand, and the three systemic opposition parties, on the other, are unhappy with the current situation.

            And because the Kremlin has the whip hand, the parliamentary correspondent of the Rosbalt news agency says, the most likely changes could be the decapitation of the three opposition parties by the promotion of their current leaders to the Federation Council and by organizing parties along new lines (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2021/08/04/1914574.html).

            Zemskova stresses that so far these are just rumors swirling around in Moscow and may come to nothing and that any changes won’t occur immediately, but her comments call attention to growing tensions between the Kremlin and the systemic opposition and the desire of the former to have an opposition totally rather than only partially loyal.

            There is near universal agreement, she says, that the same four parties will be in the Duma after the vote as now, although there will be many new faces in each and there may be a handful of representatives from the new parties the Kremlin has promoted as spoilers in recent months.

            To achieve that end, the Presidential Administration has become less concerned about boosting participation but instead wants to ensure that those who do vote vote the correct way so that the powers that be will not have to intervene with massive administrative measures to ensure the outcome the Kremlin wants.

            But if the same four parties will dominate the scene, the relations between them after the election are likely to be ever less easy, especially as the leaders of the systemic opposition parties look to the 2024 presidential race, Zemskova continues. Those relations already have become anything but smooth.

            The most obvious tensions are between the Kremlin and the KPRF, sparked when the later decided to include over Kremlin objections former and potentially future presidential candidate Pavel Grudinin in its party list. To bring the systemic opposition back into line, several ideas are being floated.

            According to one, Putin will promote the current leaders of the three systemic opposition parties to the Federation Council thus forcing out those who have grown restive and bring to the fore people whom it believes it can more easily control. The leaders of these parties dismiss this idea, but there are too many versions of such rumors to dismiss them entirely.

            And according to others, the Kremlin wants to completely revamp the opposition, dividing it and event the Duma membership as a whole between a nominally “conservative” and a nominally “left” party, the two of which would replace the long-existing four and subsume their memberships.

            Toward that end, Zemskova says, there are suggestions that the Kremlin wants to dispense with Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR entirely, dividing its membership between United Russia and some new opposition party, although there are no signs that Zhirinovsky or the leaders of the other two systemic opposition parties plan to go anywhere.

            The fact that the ratings of all the parties continue to fall gives the Kremlin an opening and may explain these rumors or leaks, but talk about such changes, if it does not lead to them, may nonetheless lead to a sharpening of divisions between United Russia and the others and even to the opposition more ready to oppose the party of power.