Russian governors election law introduced in Duma

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Tom

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.

Return of the (Elected) Governors?

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Tom

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.

Putin talks McCain, then political reform

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.

Could the Duma elections actually help Putin? All signs point to…

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Tom

If there’s a better way to jump start a blog than a good, old-fashioned polemic, then I (obviously) can’t think of one. That’s partly why I’ve decided to write about Greogry Feifer’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post, but also to refute an argument I find, well, befuddling. Feifer writes that, contrary to popular belief, the Dec. 4 Duma election results in Russia – when United Russia’s vote total dropped about 15% from the 65% of all votes cast – actually represent a strengthening of Vladimir Putin’s political position. This flies in the face of the collective wisdom that holds that the drop in the official count (to say nothing of the unofficial count, which many believe to be as much as 10-15% less) shows that Russians are growing tired of Putin. And because it flies in the face of what we all collectively “know,” I really wanted to like what Feifer wrote. I wanted to like it because it adds some balance to the Washington Post’s largely anti-Kremlin and anti-Putin editorial page. But, I just couldn’t.

The reason why I can’t get behind Feifer is that he is being too clever by half. As someone guilty of this on occasion (and more frequently, being not clever by more than half), I sympathize with Feifer, but I have to disagree with him here. Sometimes, the collective wisdom is right and this happens to be one of those times. His argument that United Russia’s loss is Putin’s gain ignores a pretty basic truth about the elections. The vast majority of people who voted against United Russia (and this is the dominant reason for its drop as opposed to anything the other parties did) were casting a vote against Putin and the system he has fostered over the last 11 years. If you accept this to be true, then Feifer has to be wrong.

Feifer’s arguments against this line of thinking largely uncritically accept the comestic and

semantic distance Putin has put between himself and the party. The fact that Dmitry

Everyone knows Putin didn't get stronger from the election, but what this presupposes is, maybe he did?

Medevedev and not Putin headed the national party list misses the point, as does mentioning that Putin is technically not even a member of the party. United Russia, as the ‘party of power,’ wholly exists as an extension of Putin’s personal authority and the authority of the system of governance he heads. It is difficult to really, honestly separate the two, regardless of Putin’s ineffectual efforts to create distance between himself and the ‘Part of Crooks and Thieves.’ Tellingly, these efforts have been basically ignored by Russians, who are not so stupid as to not see through it no matter what they think of Putin.

This is the dagger in the heart of Feifer’s argument – whether or not Russians were technically voting for or against Putin, they believed they were. This perception that a vote against United Russia was a vote against Putin manifests itself when crowds chant things like ‘Putin is a thief.’ A lessening of popular support does not translate into a strengthening of his political position no matter which way you slice it. Feifer tries to get around this by arguing that by weakening United Russia and, by extension, parliament’s say over government policy, Putin is strengthening his institutional position as president.

To make this argument, however, is to lend too much credence to a purely mechanical reading of how Russian politics are structured. Sure, Putin can rule as President purely by decree or without much reference to parliament, but the whole reason behind creating United Russia was so that he did not have to. In any event, the actual structure and institutions underpinning and legitimizing Putin’s power are of secondary importance to Putin’s personal authority, as Feifer basically acknowledges at the end of the piece. The Duma election results – since United Russia is so closely tied to Putin in the minds of most people – have to be read as a blow to that authority.

If all this is obvious, then I half-heartedly apologize. The basic point to be made here is that, no matter how various analysts try to spin it, Putin cannot be happy with the way things have turned out. How it actually affects his hold on power is not at all clear, but it seems to me there is a long-term threat to him here. Putin has maintained his power in large part due to his ability to unite the country’s major political cliques behind him. His authority in doing this stems from a combination of economic success (including the personal economic success of the elite), his political gravitas and a general consensus that as helmsman of the country, he charted the correct course out of the 1990s. If some of these political elites – such as the more liberal clique cultivated during Medvedev’s presidency – start to sense cracks forming in Putin’s personal authority (for example, if they start to agree with anti-Putin factions that he is no longer leading the country in the right direction) then that could become a major, if not existential, challenge to his political future. Whether the Duma elections and their aftermath represent the first crack, it is far too early to tell, but it should start becoming more clear in the next weeks and months.

Someone was bound to go there…

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Tom

It was only a matter of time before someone tried to somehow direct some of the blame for the Dec. 11 riot towards the liberals and, thank God, Vladislav Surkov ended the suspense surrounding the question of who was going to do it. Surkov, everyone’s favorite behind-the-scenes-but-not-really Kremlin official, told Izvestiya in an interview published Dec. 16 that “after all, it’s the ‘liberal’ public putting unsanctioned rallies into fashion and Nazis and goons are going to continue this fashion.”

It's the liberals' fault, can't you see!?

He added, “The 11th [of December] occurs from the 31st” a snappy reference to Strategy-31, a group that gathers on the 31st of every month to draw attention to Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which lists the right to peaceful assembly. A somewhat clever line, but why give all the credit to Vladislav Yurevich for pointing out this linkage when there are other people making the same connections?

President of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov, the man with the golden gun, also slammed Russia’s liberals for paving the path to the progrom in a press release on the Chechen government’s website, saying the “irresponsible opposition paved the way for such a social explosion.” He went on to damn liberals for an “aspiration at any price to cause chaos in the country, achieve massive disorder, [and] the growth of a mood of protest in society.”

Putin, during his 4.5 hour ‘chat’ with the country yesterday, didn’t exactly lay the blame for the riots at the feet of the liberals, but he wasn’t particularly nice to them, either

“Our society, including the liberals, must understand that there must be order. Otherwise, our liberal intelligentsia may have to shave off their beards, put on helmets and head out to fight the radicals themselves,”

Not a bad suggestion, actually, but it just tries to cloud what seems to be a pretty clear picture.

Sure, it’s possible to argue that civil society groups engaging in unsanctioned rallies subvert the rule of law, but when people already mistrust or ignore legal remedies for reasons of their own, like many of the people at Manezh seem to have done, then the example of defiant civil society activists seems irrelevant.

Taken at their word (for better or for worse), many of the participants in the various rallies and riots are turning out because they believe the police have mishandled the investigation into Sviridov’s death. If you’re questioning the police’s ability to enforce the law (keep suspects in custody), then it seems logical that you would be a lot more defiant in the face of police power.

Even assuming they would have looked to Strategy-31 for inspiration (unlikely it seems to me) I highly doubt that they found have found it in the organization’s monthly meetings (read Oleg Kashin’s article on the May 31, 2010 meeting in translation on A Good Treaty) which have almost always been quashed by police. The people at Manezh would have shown up regardless of the activities of liberals or Strategy-31 or whoever.

It's all Surkov's fault, can't you see!?

Try as I might, I can’t quite see how the liberals are to blame for people beating the shit out of dark-skinned people in central Moscow. So, with that in mind, let’s see what the liberals had to say.

We’re not to blame! It’s all Surkov’s fault! As you know, Surkov is one of the founders of nationalist party Rodina, Surkov has ties to nationalist and football fan groups and members of Surkov-inspired youth groups were allegedly present at the Manezh riots: “Surkov has to answer for all of this” wrote liberal opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on his blog.

You know what, on second thought, I just give up….

Caution on Medvedev’s independence

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Tom

Luzhkov’s dismissal has all kinds of people throwing around all kinds of theories about why he was fired and how much Dmitry Medvedev had to do with it. BiznessLanch would like to contribute to that mess by expressing its opinion on the matter.

Many people have pointed to the assertive step of firing arguably the third most prominent political figure in the country as Medvedev’s first step toward creating an independent political persona from Vladimir Putin. This seems a perfectly reasonable conclusion to reach, but it seems this is an independence with limits. Continue reading →

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