A draft law mandating the direct election of regional governors in Russia was introduced in the Duma Monday, giving lawmakers, observers and people with too much time on their hands (you can decide which of the latter two categories I fall into) a more detailed look at the Kremlin’s plans for the initiative first mentioned by Vladimir Putin during the December 15 “Conversation with Putin.” As I wrote at the time, the idea of re-introducing direct gubernatorial elections has been one of the more interesting developments of a tumultous December in Russian politics.

Look Rustam, if you want to be re-elected, you're going to have to give me that gold mini Big Ben you've got here

At its heart, the law allows for direct, popular vote election of the heads of Russia’s 83 regions – simple enough, but it does expand upon issues raised when Putin first broached the subject in December. Most interestingly, the draft law retains a “filter” of sorts, in which the president ostensibly reviews the potential candidates in regional elections to make sure they aren’t criminals or secessionists hell bent on destroying Mother Russia. While the idea was an integral part of Putin’s original proposal, the idea evoked confusion over its implementation and, frankly, its necessity. It is still in the draft law, but – if anything – the issue of the ‘filter’ is even less clear than before.

For starters, the draft law (which you can find in Russian here) has two methods for candidates to stand for election. Under the first, political parties can put forward their candidate after “consultations” with the president – this would be the ‘filter’ discussed briefly above. The law gives the president the responsibility for working out exactly how this “consultation” would be structured. Under the second format, candidates can run as independents – they just have to collect enough signatures to get on a regional ballot; the responsibility for creating the rules for how many signatures and in what timeframe is given to regional legislatures. No ‘presidential filter’ needed.

This, as you might guess, has caused some head scratching. The deputy chairman of the Duma’s committee on constitutional legislation – the LDPR’s Sergey Ivanov – told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that he didn’t understand how there could be different rules for different candidates. “‘If there are consultations, then they should be for everyone,” he said, “but there are [consultations] for party candidates and, for independents, there aren’t for some reason.” It is a difficult position to argue with – there is a basic disconnect here. Then, to confuse things more, Larissa Brychyova, the head of the Kremlin’s State-Legal Directorate, told journalists that the consultations were voluntary and that even if the parties do consult with the president, then they don’t have to listen.

So why even have the ‘filter’ in the first place? According to Brychyova, the consultation mechanism is needed “to caution parties against personnel mistakes” in certain situations.  One would think, however, that independent candidates – who would not be vetted by a party – would pose more of a threat in this respect. Moreover, in a normally functioning party democracy, the president would only be happy if an opposition party put forward a weak candidate to run against his/her party’s candidate, but then again, Russia ain’t that. More interestingly – and I think more plausibly – Aleksey Makarkin of the Center for Political Technologies posited that the allusion to ‘consultations’ in the text of the law was Medvedev’s attempt to ‘save face’ after Putin made the ‘filter’ a part of his original proposal. Without Putin backing down on the idea, it leaves those opposed with little room to maneuver. With this in mind, Brychyova’s announcement that the consultations would be ‘voluntary’ can be seen as an attempt to move away from the idea of a filter without completely jettisoning it.

No matter how the ‘consultation/filter’ process was included in the draft, it is a curious idea at best. As I’ve argued earlier, it strips the initiative of a lot of the democratic credibility it needs to start placating Russians disaffected with the political situation in the country. Moreover, as Makarkin points out, if the president were to veto a popular candidate’s bid for governor, then that just puts the Kremlin in a bad light; it would show an explicit disregard for what people actually think. Finally, the pre-election filter mechanism is not even really necessary – the Russian president still maintains the ability to remove a governor from office, so any ‘personnel mistakes’ could be corrected.

That process, however, will be made a little more transparent and constrained under the proposed law. A situation like when longtime Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov was fired for ‘losing the confidence’ of the president would be, in theory, more difficult under the new law. Now, the president would need to show that the governor to be fired was guilty of corruption (the law says “corruption or an [illegal] outstanding conflict of interest”) and the governor would, in theory, be able to appeal the decision to the Russian supreme court; the governor would also be eligible to run again in the next election regardless of the outcome of the appeal, according to a Rossiiskaya Gazeta article.

If that seems to limit the ability to get ride of governors guilty of “drinking vodka and not going to work” as Brychyova joked, then there is another option. Interestingly, the draft law allows for direct recall elections after a governor has served one year in office. In order for a governor to be recalled, a court would first need to find that the governor in question either a) violated local or federal law or b) is guilty of not fulfilling their official duties. After that, signatures would be collected and, if enough are gathered (the exact number is to be determined by the regional legislatures), then a recall election would be held. In that election, a majority of voters would need to vote in favor of the recall in order for it to come into effect.

The law, which could go into effect as early as this spring, also sets governors’ terms at five years and does not impose any term limits.

The Initial Verdict

Insert generic caption for this horribly generic election picture

In all, the draft law on direct gubernatorial elections has some interesting ideas, but the main questions revolve around its implementation. With almost any major piece of political legislation in Russia, there is a large divide between what is written on paper and the legislation’s actual effect. In this case, the divide looks to be particularly pronounced.

There will be direct elections of governors, probably as early as later this year, after the bill is passed. This much is sure. After that, the basic conditions of the Russian political system as they currently stand will keep the law from becoming a vehicle for real democratic change. The presence of a ‘filter’ makes this pretty clear, but there are other reasons as well. For example, the recall provision apparently puts the power to dump governors into the hands of the voters, but the lack of a truly independent judicial system in Russia means that initial requirement for a court review could scupper any recall effort. It is not particularly difficult to imagine a governor leaning on local courts – assuming the governor even had to resort to putting a carrot/stick proposition to the court – in order to throw out a legal challenge to his administration.

Moreover, as the point has been made in my earlier article on this topic, the law doesn’t prevent manipulation of election results or the resorting to administrative means to keep viable opposition candidates off ballots. New legislation lowering barriers of entry to political parties could mitigate this second possibility, or it could not – again, the devil is in the implementation.

The real benefit of the law is clearly not, then, that it provides a masterstroke dramatically improving the standard of democracy and elections in Russia – there are too many factors at play for any law to accomplish that. Rather, as I’ve said before, the benefit consists of moving some of the basis for the actual authority of regional governors away from the Kremlin and to the regions where they actually rule. In some cases, like that of former long-term Tatarstan governor Mintimer Shaimiev – who named his successor upon stepping down in 2010 after more than 20 years in office, that authority is based mostly locally, but in others, governors are entirely dependent on the Kremlin for their position. These governors are less likely to be able to act without the direction and authority from the Kremlin behind them. Injecting more energy into the federal system, in order to better deal with local conditions and challenges, is needed and this law represents an opportunity to do that.

Plenty of questions remain. How the law will be implemented and its actual impact are two obvious questions. How many governors will be relieved of their duties before the law comes into effect – Volgograd governor Anatoly Brovko and Arkhangelsk governor Ilya Mikhail’chuk have been fired in recent days – is still in question, although news reports have cited Kremlin sources saying a massive shuffling in the governor ranks is unlikely. Finally, at a more speculative level, there is the question of what, if anything, will happen to the 8 federal districts and their leadership with the new legislation. It won’t be until late Spring that we could start seeing the very earliest effects of this law, but it certainly be an interesting few months to see if, and how, this legislation evolves.