Special report: The Russian elections. Putin’s way

Date: 13/12/03

Russia's experiment with parliamentary democracy, never full-hearted, is more or less dead. The country's wellbeing now depends more than ever on one man

“WE'VE become apolitical. And that's a good thing.” Coming from Dmitri and Maria, a 31-year-old Moscow couple, these are chilling words. Twelve years ago they and their friends were on the streets, helping overthrow the Soviet Union. In elections they voted for either the social-democratic Yabloko or the pro-business Union of Right Forces (SPS), the self-appointed guardians of Russian liberalism. Since then they have turned into those parties' perfect target voters: a young middle-class family, jointly earning around $2,000 a month. But on December 7th, in the election for Russia's lower house of parliament, the Duma, they put their crosses next to the last of the 24 options on the ballot paper: Against All Candidates. Whoever won, they said, it would make no difference to their lives. “We came to vote just so as to keep out people like Zhirinovsky,” said Dmitri with a chuckle.

The results have probably astounded even them. Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his ultra-nationalist, ultra-misnamed Liberal Democrats nearly doubled their vote over the last election in 1999. Yabloko and the SPS, on the other hand, were wiped out overnight: both fell short of the 5% needed to get their party-list candidates into the Duma, leaving them with just a few seats each from the single-mandate districts that make up half the Duma. Even Against All Candidates, at 4.8%, polled more.

Close behind the Liberal Democrats came Motherland, a Kremlin-backed party born only a few months ago. Led by Sergei Glazyev, an ex-Communist, and Dmitry Rogozin, a moderate nationalist, it did the job it was created for: snatching votes from the Communists, whose 12.7% vote was barely half what they won in 1999. The People's Party, a splinter of the main pro-Kremlin force, United Russia, got 19 single-mandate seats. The only non-surprise was that United Russia itself came first. Together with its single-mandate deputies, it has 222 seats, just shy of half the Duma.

The Duma that results is a democrat's nightmare: three parties whose only ideologies are an almost slavish loyalty to President Vladimir Putin and varying degrees of nationalism, plus one made of the dregs of seven decades of totalitarian rule. The two liberal parties were always small and their democratic credentials were often dubious; but, if ineffectual, they were at least loud. With so few seats, they will have even less influence; recovering it will be even harder; and blocking government legislation, good or bad, will be impossible. For the next four years, parliament belongs to Mr Putin and to those around him.

True, that was nearly the case before. And the liberals are much to blame for their own defeat. The shock of it may trigger a needed renewal. But, given Russia's history, it is not a good sign for the future.

Autopsy of a defeat

The elections have overturned a big assumption about Russia's democratisation. This was that as a middle class emerged, it would start to adopt democratic values and demand them from its leaders. A huge popular groundswell desired the fall of the Soviet Union, after all, and if those people were at first too busy surviving the aftermath to worry about democracy, prosperity would soon fix that. The 1990s did little to improve most Russians' lives, but under Mr Putin stability has returned, the economy has grown and a true middle class is appearing. So why did they not vote as they were meant to?

The answer is complex. One reason, of course, is that United Russia was the state's party. Mr Putin himself, defying the spirit, if never quite the letter, of the law, openly supported it. National, state-run TV stations blatantly ignored the law that requires equal media coverage for all candidates. In some regions the party polled more than double its national average of 37%, a strong sign of vote-fixing by zealous governors. In more remote areas especially, local bosses used strong-arm tactics such as making government workers campaign in their free time, on pain of being fired. Outside observers noted, and harshly criticised, all these things. Without them, say Yabloko leaders, their party would have cleared the 5% hurdle. The Communists are doing their own vote-count, which so far, they claim, gives both SPS and Yabloko more than 5%.

Recriminations are also flying within SPS and Yabloko. “There was a huge problem with the campaign strategy,” says Lev Shlosberg, the Yabloko candidate in the western city of Pskov. “We were repeating what we've been saying for the past ten years, instead of coming up with a new formula for the 21st century.” Alexander Barannikov, an SPS Duma member who has lost his seat, has similar misgivings: “We couldn't get our message across to the 15% or 20% of people who had started to live well. We couldn't explain to them that their good life today isn't a given.” He thinks the campaign could have raised topics such as paying for health care and education - unpopular with most Russians, but something that the newly affluent might agree with. Indeed, Maria and Dmitri, who have a seven-year-old daughter, concurred: “None of the parties talked about health and education.”

In any case, the problem goes back further. It may have slipped below the magic 5% this time, but Yabloko has never reached double figures in ten years of fighting elections. Its rival, SPS, was only created for the 1999 vote, when it got 8.5%; but on that occasion Mr Putin, who was then prime minister, openly lent it his support. Without his help it collapsed. So why could the parties never tap their supposed core electorate?

Grigory Yavlinsky, the Yabloko leader, blames it on the fact that “When people saw what democracy looked like, they changed their minds about it.” The reforms of the 1990s created not a middle class but a super-rich elite and a poverty-stricken mass. Post-Soviet devaluation robbed millions of their life savings. State companies were sold off to a few rich bankers at a fraction of their value, in a rigged scheme, in return for their supporting Boris Yeltsin's re-election in 1996. The fact that it was seen as necessary to ward off the resurgence of communism didn't make it any less cynical. And the default and economic crash of 1998, just when things were starting to get better, only confirmed the average Russian's suspicions that it had all been for nothing. The fact that economic growth under Mr Putin has come with more centralised control and less press freedom only proves to many that even more authority is needed.

Also, the party system is young and, as youngsters tend to be, weak and messy. In the 1995 election alone, 43 parties ran. The 5% Duma barrier was designed to weed out the just-for-fun contenders, but even the bigger ones have mutated, merged and divided like bacteria, leaving the voter bewildered. United Russia, for example, was a confederation formed in the Duma by Regions of Russia, which had never run in an election; Unity, which is nicknamed Bear; Fatherland-All Russia, which itself used to be two separate parties; and the People's Party, which has now split off.

In such a system, ideology matters little, and it is hard for opposition parties to convince anyone that they really are the opposition, except by opposing. Yabloko and SPS, though, more often than not backed the government's reforms. Indeed, SPS was often the source of them. That was enough to make them look like its cronies.

Instead, it is faces that voters latch on to. The liberals' chief faces are Yabloko's Mr Yavlinsky, who after ten years as almost the sole front-man of Russia's social conscience resembles an embittered torch-singer; and SPS's Anatoly Chubais, who as deputy prime minister in the mid-1990s oversaw the privatisations that made the oligarchs rich. The chief face of the pro-Kremlin parties is Mr Putin, whose approval ratings still hover between 70% and 80%. No contest. Likewise, Motherland (fresh, young leaders) is thought to have lured voters from the Communists and Yabloko (old has-beens) thanks largely to Mr Rogozin's performance on television.

Then there are other reasons. Under the old Soviet propiska system, Russians can vote only in their place of permanent residence, which is usually where they were born unless they have bought property elsewhere. Yabloko and SPS's upwardly and geographically mobile voters, the people most likely to be living and renting in a different city, fall foul of this. Another nail in the parties' coffin was their bitter campaign squabbles, which dragged both of them down.

The final one was the long-running investigation into Yukos, Russia's largest oil company. Like most big firms it funded SPS and Yabloko, as well as the Communists, and had several of its staff among their parliamentary candidates. When prosecutors launched an attack on Yukos, culminating in the arrest in October of its boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, all those associated with the firm were tainted. The jailing of Russia's richest man proved popular with the masses: particularly useful as the interior minister, Boris Gryzlov, is also the head of United Russia. And both Motherland and the Liberal Democrats capitalised on the public's distaste for Mr Khodorkovsky by calling for increased taxes on natural-resources companies, a call that even some of SPS's members supported.

Power to the president

In short, fraud aside, the Russian people spoke on December 7th, and their message was that an all-powerful president is just fine with them. So what will Mr Putin do with his new strength?

Answer: carry on as before, only more so. Having spent his first term securing the state's finances with the help of soaring oil prices, and with his re-election next March in effect guaranteed, he is now ready to push reforms that will spread wealth into the rest of the economy, says Chris Weafer, the chief strategist at Alfa-Bank in Moscow. These include closing tax loopholes that allowed the natural-resource companies to fill their wallets, while lightening the tax burden on everyone else; reinforcing the banking system to make it the driver of small business growth; investing in decaying infrastructure, especially the crumbling Soviet-era housing blocks and heating systems; putting more into education; streamlining the bureaucracy; overhauling the armed forces; and reforming the judicial system.

So it is no surprise that most foreign investors are pretty happy with the new Duma. Before, the government had to cobble a majority together from various hanger-on parties. Now United Russia is just four seats short of the simple majority needed to pass laws, and getting the extra votes will be no problem. Even if both Motherland and the Liberal Democrats say no, there are still 65 “independent” deputies, many of whom will happily freelance. Moreover, with the disappearance of SPS and Yabloko, big oil companies that had blocked the tax reforms - one reason, it is thought, why Mr Khodorkovsky earned the Kremlin's ire - have lost a lot of the deputies they hoped to control.

But what if things go further? With all four of its puppet parties on board, the Kremlin will have the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution. The Liberal Democrats' first step, says one of their spokesmen, will be to propose extending the presidential term to seven years. Mr Putin has said that the constitution will stay untouched; in any case, changing it requires the approval of most of the regional legislatures too, a lengthy process. Yet two years from now, if he thinks he needs more time for his reforms, he may be tempted to accept - oh, so reluctantly - the pleas of his loyal acolytes. And other measures, such as further curbing the power of regional governors or the legislature, may appeal to him too.

All the same, events may not have played out quite as the president wants. “I think Putin wanted Yabloko in the Duma,” says Michael McFaul of Stanford University, in California. It would have provided a symbolic balance and an appearance of pluralism to show the West. Ironically, almost all the parties in the new Duma are more left-wing than the president.

Which is why it may be less pliant than it seems. Motherland and the People's Party both represent the hard-line, security-services wing of the Kremlin elite. Their runaway success has emboldened their leaders. Motherland is already repeating its demands for even higher taxes on oil companies. With Mr Zhirinovsky, they may try to obstruct the break-up or privatisation of the state-owned gas and banking behemoths, Gazprom and Sberbank, both of which stand in the way of other reforms that Mr Putin wants.

They may also interfere in foreign policy, strengthening the hand of the Kremlin hawks against Mr Putin's more westward-looking approach. Or they may just demand jobs, pressing the president to fulfil a vague promise he made earlier this year to form his next government on the basis of the Duma election. Mr Putin must re-appoint his ministers after his re-election, and the prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, is reckoned to be ready for the chop; but the thought of shifty populists like Messrs Glazyev or Rogozin driving policy is not a happy one. The nationalists, says Nikolai Petrov of the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, “could be a more serious enemy to the Kremlin than the Communists, who were a loyal opposition.”

For the next few months, therefore, all eyes will be on Mr Putin, to see whether he is as determined a reformer as he claims. But whatever the vagaries of the pro-Kremlin parties, and whatever the flaws of the anti-Kremlin ones, the emasculation of the Duma means one simple thing: politics will be less public than it was. And it is too enigmatic already.

The Yukos probes, for instance, bred a vast number of conspiracy theories about whether Mr Putin ordered them, prompted by Mr Khodorkovsky's political machinations, or whether it was his henchmen, trying to wrestle the company out of the oil baron's hands, and why. By the time of his arrest, most observers had swung towards the political interpretation, only to be left scratching their heads again when the smaller Sibneft suspended a planned merger with Yukos at the last minute. This week, after reports that Sibneft had been trying to impose its own top management on the joint company, there were new reports that the deal was definitely off; but nobody is any clearer as to whether Roman Abramovich, the main Sibneft shareholder (and owner of England's Chelsea football club) was merely trying to get the most out of Yukos's weak position, or whether the Kremlin was using him as a lever to prise Mr Khodorkovsky's shareholding away. Either way, five months of uncertainty have rocked investor confidence.

Another example is the war on Chechnya. Opinion polls show that displeasure at Mr Putin's Chechnya policy is widespread. But public debate has been restricted to a couple of dogged newspapers and a handful of Duma deputies. Some of the most outspoken ones have been murdered; the rest are now outside. Yet, as another suicide bomb - killing five people right beside the Kremlin - reminded Muscovites this week, four years of having Russian troops bogged down in the rebellious republic has done nothing to end the conflict there, and has made ordinary Russians' lives more dangerous.

Death, yes; transfiguration, maybe

How can the opposition recover? Inevitably, there is much talk of phoenixes rising from ashes. Merger talks have started, for the umpteenth time, but many believe that Mr Yavlinsky and Mr Chubais have disagreed too deeply for too long to come together now. “I think a united block would get about 6% or 6.5%, not more,” says Mr Shlosberg. The leaders could possibly be jettisoned: but almost everybody else in the parties is too unknown, and now that they are out of the Duma it will be harder still to raise their profile.

The parties' behind-the-scenes influence will continue. Mr Yavlinsky and Mr Putin are said to get on well; Mr Chubais still heads the state electricity company, and has many proteges on the government's economic team. But becoming electable is another matter. “How we'll stay in the public eye for the next four years is something we'll have to decide,” says Mr Barannikov. “I don't see the way right now.”

The Communists, for their part, face even tougher questions. Though they are still in parliament, they lost as great a share of their electorate as the smaller parties did. They are now little more than a Duma decoration - and not a pretty one, either.

To some, all this confirms the suspicions that rather than being a flowering of democracy, the 1990s were just a momentary lapse of Russia's normal authoritarianism. Certainly for the next few years the real power struggles - above all, the fight to succeed Mr Putin - will take place within the pro-Kremlin factions, without serious challenges from outside. The new Duma does, therefore, have at least one advantage: it is reality. “Before, there was just an illusion of democracy,” says Lilia Dubovaya of the SPS. “I honestly don't know if things aren't better this way.”