A Warning Shot For Putin
Parliamentary Elections and the Reawakening of Russian Politics
Article Summary and Author Biography
With its entrenched advantages, the Kremlin's United Russia party should be safe for now -- but if Vladimir Putin doesn't acknowledge the widespread dissatisfaction with his rule, he may soon find that force is the only way to preserve his regime.
KATHRYN STONER-WEISS is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Snapshot
In the wake of Sunday's contested parliamentary elections, the Russian security services have made obvious and clumsy efforts to shut down independent news sources. But controlling information online will prove impossible, and continued attempts to do so will only backfire.
Snapshot
The current protests in Moscow are too weak to radically change the country's politics by themselves. Nevertheless, they will continue to erode Putin's legitimacy. Even if he wins the March 4 election, he will not enjoy the same monopoly on power that he used to.
(World Economic Forum / flickr)
Russia's parliamentary election last Sunday saw Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party, United Russia, receive slightly less than 50 percent of the popular vote. In most countries, this would be viewed as a stunning victory. Instead, it is being interpreted by the Russian and Western press as a rebuke by a restive Russian public to Putin and his policies.
Although the electoral results are undoubtedly a signal to Putin and his political protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev, that Russian voters will not blindly follow wherever the Kremlin leads, in reality they do not portend seismographic shifts in the Russian political landscape.
The opposition parties that gained seats are no real opposition, at all. Any true opposition forces were weeded out far in advance of Sunday's elections.
Some reports, including that of The New York Times earlier this week, have argued that with only 238 seats in the 450-seat Duma, as opposed to the 315 parliamentary seats it previously held, United Russia will now be unable to change the Russian constitution unilaterally. True enough -- but what they fail to mention is that the Kremlin has little need to make any significant constitutional changes in the foreseeable future. The constitution is already stacked in favor of the presidency, and even with a reduced number of seats in parliament for United Russia, the Duma will still be compliant, since no new parties have gained seats.
The Duma is already relatively powerless compared to what Russia watchers call the "super" presidency enshrined in the 1993 constitution that was hastily written by Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first elected president. Between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 1993, Yeltsin faced a recalcitrant parliament (then called the Congress of People's Deputies), whose members resisted his attempts to reform the country's troubled economy. The standoff reached its climax in the fall of 1993, when Yeltsin disbanded parliament. When Russian deputies trapped inside the parliament building broke out and attempted to take control of a national television station, Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the building, putting an end to the showdown.
The constitution that Yeltsin then forced through by popular referendum in December 1993 resolved the issue of legislative executive power in no uncertain terms. It allows the president to rule by decree in almost every area but the budget. At the same time, the president has the authority to disband the Duma and call new elections should parliament refuse three times to accept the president's choice of prime minister, and the executive branch has full control of the country's security and defense ministries.
The ruling tandem of Putin and Medvedev has made further constitutional changes to strengthen the executive's hand. In the constitution's original version, the president could serve a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms. In his first year as president, Medvedev changed the constitution, then approved by the United Russia-dominated Duma and the compliant Federation Council (Russia's appointed upper house of parliament), to allow for two consecutive six-year terms, paving the way for Putin to serve for a total of 12 years when he retakes the presidency (as he intends to do in the upcoming March 2012 presidential elections).
What is more, even if Putin and his allies decided they needed to change the constitution (and this is doubtful), they would still have little difficulty doing so. Sunday's election results, however dispiriting for United Russia, will not bring about any significant change to the composition of the Duma. The Communist Party (which finished second with just under 20 percent of the vote, translating into 92 seats in the Duma), the Just Russia party (13 percent and 62 seats), and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (11.7 percent and about 56 seats), are exactly the same parties that have sat in the pliant Russian Duma of the past four years.
Of the three, the Communist Party has taken the most oppositional positions toward United Russia -- at least relatively speaking -- but it has seldom voted against United Russia on legislation that actually mattered. It provided modest opposition on cuts to subsidized transportation fares for pensioners, for example, but strongly supported the invasion of Georgia in 2008.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democratic Party, which was created by the Kremlin in the 1990s, has not provided any true opposition in the last ten years. Its outspoken and flamboyant leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is more concerned with attracting attention and outrage for his appearances on television than in having any substantive debate with Putin and those close to him.
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