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28.11.07
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A Restricted Election
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By Karen Dawisha
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New Laws Have Changed the Nature of Russia’s Election Campaigns
When Vladimir Putin took power in 2000, he was fond of making references to imposing a dictatorship of the law. As the state has become stronger vis-?-vis the opposition, both civil and political, it has become clear what he meant in these early statements. The Kremlin control of party formation, the use of the law on extremism to target both liberal parties and skinhead groups and the use of technicalities to diminish opposition chances of gaining any foothold in the Duma underlie the slogan heard in some Russian newspapers, quoting Spanish dictator Francisco Franco: “For friends, anything; for enemies, the law.”
The rules governing the elections have been changed since the last campaign for the State Duma in 2003: whereas previously Russia was a German-style mixed parliamentary system, with half of the deputies elected by party lists and half by single-member districts, the new system uses only a party list method, thus eliminating a core group (previously about 20 percent of the Duma) of independent deputies whose strength lay in the support they enjoyed from their home constituencies. These local power-brokers now have to seek nomination by a party funded and organized from the center in order to get elected.Naturally, the more they support Kremlin initiatives, the greater their access to administrative resources for their campaign. In addition, voters will no longer have the potential power to scuttle the elections, either by overwhelming voter abstention or overwhelmingly voting “against all” on the ballot. Now, there is no minimum turnout requirement and no possibility of a vote “against all.” Russia has moved to the system most commonly used in advanced industrial democracies—those who decide to vote for someone will have a voice; all others, by their inactivity and negativity will be discounted.
The Duma elections will also test the strength of the newly formed Just Russia, led by Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov, who has consistently called for Putin to run for a third term and for presidential terms to be extended. Whereas previously state resources to the “party of power” flowed only to United Russia’s coffers, the round of regional elections in March showed that the Kremlin was willing to support Just Russia candidates, both when local United Russia incumbents had shown insufficient fealty to the center and when there were outstanding charges of illegal activity and corruption.
As parties go into the December election, it is clear that United Russia, now with Vladimir Putin topping its list, will win, but the issue is by how much—simply half, or by enough to achieve a change to the constitution without relying on other parties. Also unclear is how the Communists and Just Russia will divide the vote on the left; and whether any other parties, including the LDPR, Union of Right Forces and Yabloko will make it beyond the threshold, which has been increased from 5 to 7 percent. Most observers expect that only 2-3 parties will be represented in the next Duma, with many of the remaining parties losing their campaign funds, in accordance with the rule that a party can receive federal funding if it exceeds 3 percent of the vote. The near impossibility of overcoming these combined political and legal barriers will likely have a large impact on party viability for the foreseeable future.
At the most basic level, individuals who either seek to challenge the government directly or who headed parties that have been barred on technicalities will not be present in the next Duma, including such public figures and veteran politicians as Sergei Baburin, Viktor Alksnis, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Dmitry Rogozin, Sergei Glazyev and Alexander Lebedev.
The 2006 law against extremism, which was extended to include defamation of officials, has also been cited in warrants. When this bill was debated in the Duma, it was announced to be aimed at curbing skinhead violence, but it has also now begun to be used against liberal opponents of the regime, including people like Lev Ponomaryov, who heads the NGO For Human Rights, and Vladimir Pribylovsky, the head of the think tank Panorama, whose manuscript on “Operation Successor” was seized during a raid in early June 2007.
Political scientist Andrei Piontovsky’s anti-Putin writings, some of which were circulated by Yabloko, became the subject of court proceedings in September 2007. Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky stated that these proceedings were designed to frame the public’s opinion of Yabloko in preparation for the elections, associating it with the circulation of “extremist literature” that, according to the Glasnost Defense Fund, hinted “at the inferiority of the Jewish, American, Russian and other nationalities.”
Making it to the next level
Beyond the intimidation of opposition politicians and their supporters, the next challenge for parties has been to get registered and run candidates who will not be barred or arrested for any number of technical reasons prior to voting day. In the round of regional elections held in March 2007, for example, political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin writing in Ogonyok magazine points out that while all of the party lists submitted for United Russia, Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) were accepted, 16 percent of the party lists for other parties were rejected, compared with only 4 percent of the party lists submitted for last year’s regional elections.
Also barred from the March regional elections in St. Petersburg was Yabloko. Electoral officials there claimed that 10.5 percent of the signatures needed to register the party were false (conveniently, the law at that time allowed 10 percent to be false, but no more). St. Petersburg is the party’s home base. Consequently, it is routinely able to muster 10-20 percent of the vote and has always had seats in the local Duma, where its members are the core group challenging the legality or propriety of real estate and other deals made by the local elite. In discussing the decision, the St. Petersburg Times quoted Yavlinsky as saying that his party believed that the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) was “following a political order from [St. Petersburg] Governor Valentina Matviyenko, with the full support of the presidential administration—and perhaps even President Vladimir Putin personally.”
At the federal electoral level, in order to be registered as a party, the new law dictates that parties must demonstrate that they have 50,000 members (up from the 10,000 members previously required) and be registered in 50 of Russia’s 88 regions. Electoral blocs are forbidden, and party members of one party cannot appear on the list of another party. Non-party candidates, for example, Putin, are allowed to be on a party’s list if they have support from 10 members of the party.
Parties have had to re-register to participate in the Duma elections themselves. Because they have seats in the current Duma, United Russia, LDPR and the Communists were legally allowed to register without going through this step. All other parties have had the choice of either collecting 200,000 valid signatures—the choice of the Democratic, Agrarian, Civil Force, Social Justice, Greens, Party of Peace and Unity and People’s Union parties—or providing deposits of 60 million rubles ($2.4 million), up from 37.5 million rubles ($1.5 million) required in 2003. Four parties provided deposits—Just Russia, Union of Right Forces, Yabloko and Patriots of Russia.
This two-step process of gaining initial registration as a party and then re-registering for the elections themselves has already had a decisive effect on the number of parties. In 2003, there were 44 parties and 23 blocs in the election. At the end of the summer, the CEC website listed over two dozen parties that previously were registered. The Justice Ministry Federal Election Service declared in mid-September that 15 parties met the legal requirements set out in the Law on Political Parties. By the time the dust settled in mid-October 2007, only 14 parties submitted their registration information, and of those, three were rejected for having 5 percent or more signatures deemed by the CEC to be falsified, including the Greens (17.3 percent invalid), the Party of Peace and Unity (5.16 percent), and Sergei Baburin’s People’s Union (8.56 percent).
The barring of the Party of Peace and Unity apparently caused a split in the CEC. One of its members, Elvira Yermakova, publicly regretted the decision that by only 100 signatures, a long-established party, and the only one headed by a woman, Sazhi Umalatova, was excluded. Baburin rejected the authenticity of the verification process: “That was the least professional group I have encountered in 17 years of my political career,” ITAR-TASS quoted him as saying. Parties had 10 days to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. The election was called one month later than previous elections, giving parties only three months rather than four, to get registered, announce their lists, present their platforms and plan their campaign. It was a sprint to the finish for all but the parties with the greatest level of advanced preparation.
Candidate registration is more stringent than previously and requires candidates to provide notarized copies of a candidate’s identity, biography, and financial data. Anyone with outstanding warrants for crimes will be banned. CEC Chairman Vladimir Churov admitted that the requirements for candidate registration had substantially increased, with each party now having to submit over 8,000 pages of notarized documents on behalf of all their candidates. The CEC can bar a candidate for incomplete data, or because there are outstanding charges against a candidate, including charges of extremism. If 25 percent of a party’s candidates are barred, the party itself is banned.
Media matters
Electoral law dictates that parties should have free access to the media once they are properly registered. Once the official campaigns get under way, however, campaign law gives registered candidates the right to free and paid television time, allocated by lots assigned on Oct. 30, with campaigning in the mass media strictly limited to the period between Nov. 3 and Nov. 30. Even though the candidates cannot demand that they receive equal coverage on the nightly news on major state-owned television channels, they will nevertheless be able through election advertisements and debates to put to the nation views that the Kremlin cannot strictly control. This fear is another reason why Kremlin elites have done what they can to prevent real opposition parties from registering.
As Yekaterina Snegireva pointed out in Nezavisimaya Gazeta-Politika, this move was a result of the run-up to the Spring 2007 round of regional elections, when secondary parties moved up the rankings to challenge the near monopoly of air time enjoyed by United Russia. Coverage for United Russia, the Communists, and Just Russia topped the rankings of parties, showing the success the Communists have had in challenging their near-exclusion from the media in court. Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, along with the LDPR, also got an increased share of airtime during the campaign period in those regions where they succeeded in getting registered.
Yet new laws on campaigning prevent opposition candidates from providing substantive critiques of the government. While previously the Kremlin could not legally control the content of parties’ TV time, the new law contains the very significant change that candidates cannot urge voters to vote against another party or candidate or cite “potentially negative consequences” of voting for another candidate.
The law governing electoral financing stipulates that each party can spend 1.8 billion rubles ($70 million) on campaigning. Only United Russia, which came into the electoral season with $13.5 million in reserve, seems likely to come near this figure—even excluding its access to the Kremlin’s administrative resources. The Moscow Times reported that the party raised a further $13.7 million in donations and membership fees in the second quarter of 2007 alone, according to the Central Elections Commission, followed by the LDPR, which had $4.8 million in reserves and raised $3.2 million in the second quarter. The Communists started the campaign with $1.7 million in the bank and raised $3.8 million in the second quarter, while Just Russia had just $365,400 but raised $4.2 million.
On the day of the elections themselves, in addition to what opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has called “repressive electoral legislation,” the Kremlin still has multiple opportunities for influencing the results at the polling stations. As Nemtsov said in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, looking at the whole range of opportunities for fraud open to the Kremlin, “a candidate could be removed; signatures could be unregistered; election results could be rigged.” The decision to restrict the nuber of foreign observers to several hundred, down from several thousand in previous elections will make it more difficult to investigate complaints.
Nemtsov’s claim about rigging appeared to be upheld by the results of the regional elections in several of the districts around Moscow, where the liberal Union of Right Forces (SPS) fell short by less than one-tenth of one percent of the magic 7 percent threshold in many of the districts, or an absolute zero number of votes in others, despite having returned candidates to the regional Dumas in previous years. The SPS was also illegally barred from witnessing the recount where in one district it failed to make the 7 percent threshold, according to party chief Nikita Belykh, by only 13 votes.
Yet, if parties can make it past the restrictive 7 percent threshold and survive many restrictions on their activities, they certainly will gain seats. The Duma must, by law, have at least two parties, so there is no longer a possibility of a one-party system. In addition, the system of proportional representation adopted—the Hare formula—is the most proportional of the various kinds of systems in general use, and the smaller parties will certainly get their share of seats. There is no doubt that the next Duma will be a shadow of previous versions. Little by little, the Kremlin has whittled away the authority of the legislative branch, and while President Putin constantly proclaims his desire to see a multi-party system emerge, the facts on the ground suggest that neither the Russian people, who seem poised to vote overwhelmingly for United Russia now that he tops their list, nor the political elite have any intention of replacing Putin’s era of stability with anything as uncertain as a multi-party parliamentary democracy.
Karen Dawisha is the Walter E. Havighurst professor of political science and the director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. |
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