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“This is the first time in post-Soviet history when only the Kremlin decides who can participate and who can’t,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “The Kremlin decides which party can exist and which party cannot. For the first time in post-Soviet history, a wide specter of political forces cannot participate in this election. I call it selection before election.”
-- Clifford J. Levy for The New York Times
Putin enjoys continued success in ruling Russia under his hand and in returning the country to one-party rule. An optimist can hope that this is still just an arguably beneficial transition until Russia can better handle multi-party democracy, and that Putin is Russia's providential overseer in these tough times. The rest of us can marvel over how much things stay the same in this old world.
And you know Dick Cheney is envious.
___ ___ ___
With Tight Grip on Ballot, Putin Is Forcing Foes Out
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
MOSCOW, Oct. 13 — Balloting for Parliament will be held across Russia in December, and this much is already clear: Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, who was first elected in the turbulent yet hopeful days after the Soviet Union’s fall and then blossomed into a fervent advocate for democracy, will lose.
So will Viktor V. Pokhmelkin, who used his seat to crusade against corruption in the police and other law enforcement agencies. Swept away, too, will be Anatoly A. Yermolin, a K.G.B. officer turned liberal stalwart who has been a lone voice in rebellion against President Vladimir V. Putin’s expansive power.
Nearly eight years after Mr. Putin took office and began tightening his control over all aspects of the Russian government, he will almost certainly with this election succeed in extinguishing the last embers of opposition in Parliament.
Strict new election rules adopted under Mr. Putin, combined with the Kremlin’s dominance over the news media and government agencies, are expected to propel the party that he created, United Russia, to a parliamentary majority even more overwhelming than its current one.
The system is so arrayed against all other parties that even some Putin allies have acknowledged that it harks back to the politics of the old days. Sergei M. Mironov, a staunch Putin supporter and the chairman of the upper house of Parliament, suggested recently that United Russia seemed to have been modeled on a certain forerunner.
“I think that the television broadcasts from the United Russia convention reminded a lot of people of long-forgotten pictures from the era of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” said Mr. Mironov, leader of another pro-Putin party, Just Russia.
Mr. Putin’s second presidential term expires next year, and under the Russian Constitution, he cannot run for a third consecutive term. At the lavishly choreographed convention of United Russia this month, he indicated that he would transfer his power base to the party and Parliament and could become prime minister next year. The announcement raised the stakes for the December election.
The president currently appoints and wields far more power than the prime minister, but that could change should Mr. Putin become prime minister. Some analysts are speculating that Mr. Putin may try to create a parliamentary system with a strong prime minister and the president as a largely ceremonial post, akin to the arrangement in countries like Italy or Israel.
Mr. Putin has high approval ratings, and whatever the political climate, Russians today have far more economic and social freedoms than existed under Communism. Many people would like Mr. Putin to remain president, giving him credit for the strong economy and stability of recent years. Still, it appears that he is leaving little to chance in the parliamentary races.
“This is the first time in post-Soviet history when only the Kremlin decides who can participate and who can’t,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “The Kremlin decides which party can exist and which party cannot. For the first time in post-Soviet history, a wide specter of political forces cannot participate in this election. I call it selection before election.”
Mr. Ryzhkov’s party, the Republican Party, one of the oldest in post-Soviet Russia, was disbanded by the government this year after it was accused of not having enough support under the new rules. Mr. Ryzhkov said his party easily met the standard but said officials ignored the evidence in a sham proceeding.
First chosen in 1993, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Parliament in its early years was a raucous center of power that often challenged the president at the time, Boris N. Yeltsin. In Mr. Putin’s first term, it sometimes retained that role, but Mr. Putin has steadily reined it in, and these days, it is considered little more than a sidekick of the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin has said the tougher election rules are in part intended to eliminate the fractious politics that he asserts are caused by a proliferation of small parties. In recent months, he has contended that he is a champion of multiparty democracy, though he has also said that the system needs time to develop.
“We cannot build Russia’s future by tying its many millions of citizens to just one person or group of people,” he said last month. “We will not be able to build anything lasting unless we put in place a real and effectively functioning multiparty system and develop a civil society that will protect society and the state from mistakes and wrong actions on the part of those in power.”
In the last parliamentary election, in 2003, half of the 450 seats in the lower house of Parliament, called the Duma, were allocated according to geographic districts, and half were allotted based on party support. (Members of the less powerful upper house, known as the Federation Council, are appointed.)
The 2003 election was also heavily skewed in favor of United Russia, political analysts said, and the party swept to victory.
Even so, liberal and independent lawmakers were able to retain a toehold.
They won a handful of races by mounting grass-roots campaigns in geographic districts, allowing them to form one of the last bastions of opposition to Mr. Putin inside the government. Among the victors were Mr. Ryzhkov, from Siberia, and Mr. Pokhmelkin, from Perm, in the Ural Mountains region in Russia’s center.
After the election, saying that he was responding to several acts of terrorism in Russia, Mr. Putin declared that the government structure needed to be centralized to unify the country. He pushed through legislation that abolished geographic districts in parliamentary elections and did away with elections for regional governors.
In the parliamentary election on Dec. 2, Russians will vote only for parties, not for candidates. What is more, parties now need 7 percent of the national vote to gain seats in Parliament, up from 5 percent. They also need to submit proof that they have at least 50,000 members to be recognized as official parties, up from 10,000.
It now seems possible that United Russia’s advantages are so great that it will be the only party to surpass 7 percent. In that case, the Constitution requires at least one other party in Parliament, so some token seats will be allocated to the second most popular one.
Andrew C. Kuchins, director of the Russia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the liberal opposition was vulnerable because its leaders had quarreled and failed to present a united front. He said Mr. Putin seemed to want to establish United Russia as a force that would long dominate Russia, akin to the governing parties in Japan or Mexico in the 20th century.
“Putin has methodically over the last seven years been reducing the power of any other locus in the system that is independent,” Mr. Kuchins said. “This is the final nail in the coffin. And it doesn’t look like that coffin is going to get opened anytime soon.”
Mr. Putin’s allies said United Russia was winning elections not because the rules were biased, but because the public approved of Mr. Putin and valued the nation’s new strength. They said Russians looked askance at the example of Ukraine, the neighbor to the west, where three leading parties have been closely matched and have regularly feuded over the last three years.
“For Russians, the Ukrainian scenario is terrifying,” said Igor Y. Dyomin, a spokesman for United Russia in Parliament.
Mr. Pokhmelkin, the member from Perm who is almost certain to lose his seat, said he had been increasingly marginalized in recent years, and sometimes even barred by United Russia from making speeches in Parliament. He said that he tried to prod the Kremlin on issues like police corruption and the rights of motorists, but that it was largely futile.
“The Parliament has been brought down to the level of a servant, serving the ruling bureaucracy,” he said. “And there cannot be any other assessment.”
-- Clifford J. Levy for The New York Times
xXx
“This is the first time in post-Soviet history when only the Kremlin decides who can participate and who can’t,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “The Kremlin decides which party can exist and which party cannot. For the first time in post-Soviet history, a wide specter of political forces cannot participate in this election. I call it selection before election.”
-- Clifford J. Levy for The New York Times
Putin enjoys continued success in ruling Russia under his hand and in returning the country to one-party rule. An optimist can hope that this is still just an arguably beneficial transition until Russia can better handle multi-party democracy, and that Putin is Russia's providential overseer in these tough times. The rest of us can marvel over how much things stay the same in this old world.
And you know Dick Cheney is envious.
___ ___ ___
With Tight Grip on Ballot, Putin Is Forcing Foes Out
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
MOSCOW, Oct. 13 — Balloting for Parliament will be held across Russia in December, and this much is already clear: Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, who was first elected in the turbulent yet hopeful days after the Soviet Union’s fall and then blossomed into a fervent advocate for democracy, will lose.
So will Viktor V. Pokhmelkin, who used his seat to crusade against corruption in the police and other law enforcement agencies. Swept away, too, will be Anatoly A. Yermolin, a K.G.B. officer turned liberal stalwart who has been a lone voice in rebellion against President Vladimir V. Putin’s expansive power.
Nearly eight years after Mr. Putin took office and began tightening his control over all aspects of the Russian government, he will almost certainly with this election succeed in extinguishing the last embers of opposition in Parliament.
Strict new election rules adopted under Mr. Putin, combined with the Kremlin’s dominance over the news media and government agencies, are expected to propel the party that he created, United Russia, to a parliamentary majority even more overwhelming than its current one.
The system is so arrayed against all other parties that even some Putin allies have acknowledged that it harks back to the politics of the old days. Sergei M. Mironov, a staunch Putin supporter and the chairman of the upper house of Parliament, suggested recently that United Russia seemed to have been modeled on a certain forerunner.
“I think that the television broadcasts from the United Russia convention reminded a lot of people of long-forgotten pictures from the era of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” said Mr. Mironov, leader of another pro-Putin party, Just Russia.
Mr. Putin’s second presidential term expires next year, and under the Russian Constitution, he cannot run for a third consecutive term. At the lavishly choreographed convention of United Russia this month, he indicated that he would transfer his power base to the party and Parliament and could become prime minister next year. The announcement raised the stakes for the December election.
The president currently appoints and wields far more power than the prime minister, but that could change should Mr. Putin become prime minister. Some analysts are speculating that Mr. Putin may try to create a parliamentary system with a strong prime minister and the president as a largely ceremonial post, akin to the arrangement in countries like Italy or Israel.
Mr. Putin has high approval ratings, and whatever the political climate, Russians today have far more economic and social freedoms than existed under Communism. Many people would like Mr. Putin to remain president, giving him credit for the strong economy and stability of recent years. Still, it appears that he is leaving little to chance in the parliamentary races.
“This is the first time in post-Soviet history when only the Kremlin decides who can participate and who can’t,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “The Kremlin decides which party can exist and which party cannot. For the first time in post-Soviet history, a wide specter of political forces cannot participate in this election. I call it selection before election.”
Mr. Ryzhkov’s party, the Republican Party, one of the oldest in post-Soviet Russia, was disbanded by the government this year after it was accused of not having enough support under the new rules. Mr. Ryzhkov said his party easily met the standard but said officials ignored the evidence in a sham proceeding.
First chosen in 1993, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Parliament in its early years was a raucous center of power that often challenged the president at the time, Boris N. Yeltsin. In Mr. Putin’s first term, it sometimes retained that role, but Mr. Putin has steadily reined it in, and these days, it is considered little more than a sidekick of the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin has said the tougher election rules are in part intended to eliminate the fractious politics that he asserts are caused by a proliferation of small parties. In recent months, he has contended that he is a champion of multiparty democracy, though he has also said that the system needs time to develop.
“We cannot build Russia’s future by tying its many millions of citizens to just one person or group of people,” he said last month. “We will not be able to build anything lasting unless we put in place a real and effectively functioning multiparty system and develop a civil society that will protect society and the state from mistakes and wrong actions on the part of those in power.”
In the last parliamentary election, in 2003, half of the 450 seats in the lower house of Parliament, called the Duma, were allocated according to geographic districts, and half were allotted based on party support. (Members of the less powerful upper house, known as the Federation Council, are appointed.)
The 2003 election was also heavily skewed in favor of United Russia, political analysts said, and the party swept to victory.
Even so, liberal and independent lawmakers were able to retain a toehold.
They won a handful of races by mounting grass-roots campaigns in geographic districts, allowing them to form one of the last bastions of opposition to Mr. Putin inside the government. Among the victors were Mr. Ryzhkov, from Siberia, and Mr. Pokhmelkin, from Perm, in the Ural Mountains region in Russia’s center.
After the election, saying that he was responding to several acts of terrorism in Russia, Mr. Putin declared that the government structure needed to be centralized to unify the country. He pushed through legislation that abolished geographic districts in parliamentary elections and did away with elections for regional governors.
In the parliamentary election on Dec. 2, Russians will vote only for parties, not for candidates. What is more, parties now need 7 percent of the national vote to gain seats in Parliament, up from 5 percent. They also need to submit proof that they have at least 50,000 members to be recognized as official parties, up from 10,000.
It now seems possible that United Russia’s advantages are so great that it will be the only party to surpass 7 percent. In that case, the Constitution requires at least one other party in Parliament, so some token seats will be allocated to the second most popular one.
Andrew C. Kuchins, director of the Russia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the liberal opposition was vulnerable because its leaders had quarreled and failed to present a united front. He said Mr. Putin seemed to want to establish United Russia as a force that would long dominate Russia, akin to the governing parties in Japan or Mexico in the 20th century.
“Putin has methodically over the last seven years been reducing the power of any other locus in the system that is independent,” Mr. Kuchins said. “This is the final nail in the coffin. And it doesn’t look like that coffin is going to get opened anytime soon.”
Mr. Putin’s allies said United Russia was winning elections not because the rules were biased, but because the public approved of Mr. Putin and valued the nation’s new strength. They said Russians looked askance at the example of Ukraine, the neighbor to the west, where three leading parties have been closely matched and have regularly feuded over the last three years.
“For Russians, the Ukrainian scenario is terrifying,” said Igor Y. Dyomin, a spokesman for United Russia in Parliament.
Mr. Pokhmelkin, the member from Perm who is almost certain to lose his seat, said he had been increasingly marginalized in recent years, and sometimes even barred by United Russia from making speeches in Parliament. He said that he tried to prod the Kremlin on issues like police corruption and the rights of motorists, but that it was largely futile.
“The Parliament has been brought down to the level of a servant, serving the ruling bureaucracy,” he said. “And there cannot be any other assessment.”
-- Clifford J. Levy for The New York Times
