There are certain days that certain people look forward to every year. Super Bowl Sunday, the first/last day of school, Christmas or World UFO Day might be your ticket. If, however, you are Putin-lover and/or masochist, then yesterday was your day, the one you’ve been waiting for since last December. Yes, I am referring to the increasingly-long, annual “Conversation with Putin” in which Vladimir Putin takes questions via phone, SMS, e-mail and in person from around Russia. In the four and a half hour Putinfest (the longest in the 10 years the program has aired, according to Lenta.ru), the main man addressed topics like the Bolotnaya Square rally, foreign adoptions, federal subsidies to the Caucasus, John McCain, his Internet habits (he has none) and what he thought of people booing him at an MMA fight in Moscow (he said he thoughy they were booing his face…because its on TV all the time). Heady stuff.
Before going any further, it should be noted here that I did not watch the whole show, so I’ve relied on news reports, Twitter, transcripts, etc. to write this. I didn’t watch it, because, well, I don’t get paid to do this and I wasn’t going to wake up at 4am to watch 4 hours of mostly boring political theater.
With that awkward caveat out of the way, there was an area in his speech in which Putin opened the door to an intriguing possibility. Count me among the people thinking that the anger over the Dec. 4 Duma elections might eventually lead Putin and the Kremlin to loosen control over regional affairs, perhaps even resulting in the restoration of elections for regional governors. When Putin started on his answer to the question “Isn’t it time to return to direct gubernatorial elections?” he began what could end up being the most important (not a high standard) response of the day.
So I've got this idea, do you want to hear it before or after I make fun of John McCain?
In the course of his answer, Putin proposed a reformed, hybrid-type system under which governors – which are currently nominated by top party in each regional legislature and then directly appointed by the President – would be nominated by a combination of regional legislatures and the president (i.e. himself) before being put to a popular vote. Each party in each regional legislature would propose their candidate for governor, each candidate would be vetted at the presidential level and following that, each candidate would stand in a direct election by the region’s populace.
If it sounds overly complicated, it is. The biggest hurdle in the scheme is Putin’s insistence in a “presidential filter” for gubernatorial candidates. The reasons he gave for maintaining presidential oversight (read: control) over the process is that under the previous electoral regime, the people being elected governor weren’t effective or motivated by the public good. “…[W]e need to maintain this filter on the presidential level in order to keep people out of power who will rely on criminal, or God forbid, separatist forces, like in the national republics,” he said, echoing the rational he gave for abolishing direct elections the first go around. Of course, the filter as it stands now hasn’t been perfect, but we’ll leave that for another time.
Insisting on the extra step of presidential approval, however, strips the idea of much of its democratic appeal and complicates a process that has enough potential pitfalls as it is. While there isn’t anything on paper to study – at least not publicly – the potential mechanics of the process could cause trouble. Presumably, each party would choose its candidate before regional elections, but subjecting them to separate vetting processes – first at a regional party level (with input from the national party) and then by the president – would take an awful lot of time and energy, particularly when it would come to regions with 3 or more parties in the legislature.
Moreover, the presidential filter idea completely ignores the problems posed by party. The temptation (or the suspicion of such a temptation) on the part of the president to disqualify the strongest candidate from an opposition party would be always there. Aleksey Makarin of the Center of Political Technologies raised a similar point in Gazeta.ru, “What would happen if the presidential filter blocked the candidacy of a regionally popular opposition figure and the population stood up in his defense? It’s a destabilizing factor.” It’s impossible to separate the political nature of the presidency from its functionality, which is what this proposal in its earliest stage seems to assume is possible. This is why the ‘filter’ idea should be ditched if the reform is aiming at a reasonable degree of logic.
There are several benefits, however, to returning to some sort of direct elections to governor, some political, some administrative. An immediate short-term benefit for Putin is that rolling out a return to a system featuring some kind of direct gubernatorial election might soothe some of the rough waters roiled by the Duma elections. It seems almost certain that the idea had been bandied about in some capacity prior to Dec. 10 – Medvedev prevaricated on the topic in June, for example – but it is also a reasonable assumption that any potential plan in this direction was brought into sharper focus because of the protests.
In the longer term, direct gubernatorial elections could serve to make governors more politically viable and give them more freedom to solve local problems. United Russia bigwig Yuri Shuvalov told Vzglyad in an interview that while the decision to abolish direct elections for governors had been necessary, “On the other hand, we see, that governors don’t always have authority amongst the people in the region.” While in many cases, that authority comes from the support of local elites rather than directly from the population, direct elections would end the practice of parachuting in outsiders to serve as governor only to see them isolated once they come into office.
Coming soon to a gubernatorial election near you? (photo courtesy of rbc)
While keeping this ‘filter’ and maintaining the president’s ability to remove governors at will legally impinges on the independence of regional leaders, direct elections would still reduce individual governors’ reliance on direction from the Center to a certain extent. In Russia’s federal system, local officials often don’t have the authority to act or aren’t capable of functioning independently when they need to. An example of this can be seen in the response to the 2010 wildfires, in which local authorities either did not act to control the fires or could not because of a lack of capability. Would reinstituting gubernatorial elections have stopped the wildfires? Not by itself, but this example and others demonstrate the limitations of centralized political power in a country as diverse as Russia.
Of course, elections are not a silver bullet. Local elections can be rigged just as easily as federal ones; indeed, gubernatorial elections prior to their abolishment were never renowned as paragons of virtue. Even once in office, there is no guarantee an elected official won’t be as graft-happy or effective as an appointed one. For example, Sergey Darkin (now rumored to be on the chopping block after his region Primorsky Krai was singled out for its crime and corruption during Putin-palooza yesterday) was elected in 2001 and he hasn’t kept an exactly squeaky clean image since then. He’s certainly not the only example. More to the point, there are deeper problems in Russia’s regional administration than a lack of democracy.
The obvious issues aside, the very idea that Putin and co. are considering bringing back gubernatorial elections should be seen as positive step for federalism in Russia, which in turn would a positive step for Russia politically. The threat of separatism has largely faded and it is fairly clear that abolishing the election of governors has done nothing to deter terrorism, as was the alleged reasoning behind the abolition after the Beslan tragedy in 2004. In part due to the political marginalization of Russia’s governors, the Russia’s political system has become too centralized, both politically and administratively. Injecting some small degree of energy into Russia’s federal system via gubernatorial election could be the first step to correcting this imbalance. Allowing greater participation in sending regional representative to the upper house of parliament, the Federal Council – a twin initiative I have not discussed here – is a similar move in the right direction. Giving a little more power and prominence to regional governors will do a couple of things; 1) Provide a little more autonomy for regional leaders 2) Deflect part of the regional political dissatisfaction that would otherwise be directed at the Kremlin and 3) Possibly make regional leaders more accountable to their population at large. As it stands on the drawing board, the ‘filter’ concept is the only thing keeping this from being a major story and a real reform. Whether real reform is what Putin wants is an entirely different story.
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