Russia’s election campaign: A many-splendoured thing

Date: 30/08/03

Russian democracy offers ever more alternatives but ever fewer choices

IRONY is not the Communists' strong card. “The party of the future,” reads their banner, hanging in front of a huge panoramic photograph of a party rally full of pensioners. The other 20-odd parties, their pavilions collected for the first time in a grand exhibition centre next to the Kremlin, offer the bemused voters a similar mix of the enticing and the bizarre: from the Party of Rus (the old Slavic empire's name), handing out certificates of Russian citizenship for sticking in any passport, to the mystic Unity Conceptual Party, which promises a scientific-spiritual system of global governance, with the euro and dollar replaced by the “energo-rouble”.

Indeed, to all appearances, the race for December's elections to the Duma, the lower house of parliament, is hotting up. Earlier this month Sergei Glazyev, a populist politician who was expected to throw his lot in with the Communists, announced that instead he is assembling a left-wing coalition (which, with crowning hubris, he invited the Communists to join). Anatoly Chubais, the controversial head of the state electricity monopoly, has joined the race as a candidate for the reformist Union of Right Forces (SPS).

The Communists' own poll ratings have risen over the past few weeks, while those of the main pro-Kremlin coalition, United Russia, have slipped. This despite what should have been a popular move by the authorities: a crackdown on crime, ranging from the breaking of police corruption rings to a lengthy probe into Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, and his associates.

Mr Glazyev, say the Communists, is just a Kremlin stooge, set up to steal their votes. More likely, says Nikolai Petrov, at the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, he will attract not left-wing voters but some of the sixth or so who decide at the last minute. That might hurt less the Communists than the People's Party, which peeled off from United Russia and represents members of the security services. Their split two months ago may be one sign of a power struggle within the administration.

But behind such charades, Russian voters are left with little real choice. In parliament, the People's Party is more likely to support than oppose the government. So too will parties like the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democrats, who usually vote with the Kremlin regardless of the colourful invective of their leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Mr Glazyev's group could well do the same. That would give the authorities a majority even over a united opposition.

The opposition, meanwhile, struggles. The Communists' recent improvement may reveal discontent with the government which voters tend to express in polls by punishing United Russia rather than President Vladimir Putin. But in the long run their electorate, as their campaign poster suggests, is heading for extinction.

As for the sometimes-oppositional reformists, Yabloko and SPS, they hover near the 5% needed to get into the Duma at all. The typical Yabloko voter, according to VTSIOM, a polling firm, has become less of a democratic liberal (the party's traditional constituent) and more of a disgruntled Communist - a sad comment on Yabloko's failure to build a democratic movement. Mr Chubais's inclusion on the list of the SPS, which he co-founded, suggests to some that the party's periodic internal debate about whether to be more pro- or anti-Kremlin has swung towards the first.

But democracy is not only becoming feebler; it may become less visible. Though state-owned, Russia's oldest polling firm, VTSIOM, has won a reputation for independence. Now it is to be privatised; its director, Yuri Levada, a dissident sociologist back in Soviet times, will be replaced by a board of government appointees. The company may lose its independence; judging the election's cleanliness by comparing the result with polls will be harder.

Then again, it may not matter. How the parties perform nationally will decide only half the Duma's 450 seats. The other half are chosen in single-mandate districts. In the past these were susceptible to manipulation by the local authorities; now, since Mr Putin has strengthened federal control and appointed many senior law-enforcement officers and judges in Russia's regions, they are more at the Kremlin's mercy. In any case, what a candidate says he stands for may have little to do with reality. After the 1999 election, nearly half the Duma's single-mandate members changed party affiliation.