RUSSIAN ELECTION WATCH
No.5, December 3, 1999
Graham T. Allison, Director Writer, Editor: Henry E. Hale
Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project Production Director: Melissa C. Carr
John F. Kennedy School of Government Assistants: Ben Dunlap, Emily Van Buskirk
Harvard University Production Assistant: Emily Goodhue
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NOVEMBER’S TOP NEWS
· Putin rides popular “anti-terrorist operation” in Chechnya to huge presidential lead
· Communists poised to win Duma election, but won’t have a majority
· Putin endorses Unity, which surges into second place ahead of Fatherland-All Russia, Yabloko
· “Former reformers” 50-50 to rejoin Duma after 4-year exile thanks to clever Chubais campaign
· Kremlin hatchet man chops Luzhkov and Primakov to single digits, leaves Communists standing
· District races pit party nominees against favorites of governors and financial-industrial groups
· Chubais brands Yavlinsky “traitor” for proposing cease-fire and ultimatum in Chechnya
SEE INSIDE
· On November’s Campaign Trail: November’s developments in the election campaign p.1.
· Insider Information: Some of Russia’s most respected political analysts explain the events of November, starting on p.7.
· Spin Control: Three leading Russian parties assess the likelihood of fraud p.6.
· PLUS: the latest polls; important dates; lists of party websites; and dangers in the draft presidential election law.
BACK ISSUES AVAILABLE ON THE WEB AT:
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/bcsia/russianelectionwatch
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TRACKING THE POLLS
PARLIAMENT PRESIDENT
Sept. Oct. Nov. Sept. Oct. Nov.
Communist Party 32 26 25 Putin 4 21 45
Unity n.a. 5 18 Zyuganov 27 20 17
Fatherland-All Russia 22 21 12 Primakov 19 16 9
Yabloko 12 11 8 Yavlinsky 9 7 5
Union of Right-Wing 4 4 5 Shoigu n.a. 3 4
Zhirinovsky Bloc/LDPR 4 3 3 Zhirinovsky 3 3 3
Our Home is Russia 4 2 0 Luzhkov 10 8 2
Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) polls: November 26-29, October 15-19, 1999, September 17-21. Percentages are from the total of those who said they intended to vote.
KEY DATES
· December 19 Duma Elections
· June 4 (25) Presidential Elections (runoff if necessary)
ON NOVEMBER’S CAMPAIGN TRAIL
On December 19, just two weeks away, Russians will select their new parliament (the Duma) in competitive elections. Current polls project a Duma much like the old one. While this vote serves as a warm-up for the more important presidential contest on June 4, the new Duma will face some major decisions, including whether to ratify START II, change the Constitution, and reform the tax system. Voters will get a two-part ballot, each part electing half of the 450 Duma seats. On one half of the ballot, they will be asked to choose from a list of 27 parties, and those parties receiving at least 5% win a number of seats proportional to their share of the vote. On the other half of
the ballot, voters will see a list of candidates running in their own territorial district, as happens in US Congressional elections. While many of these candidates do belong to parties, many represent governors’ political machines or are stand-ins for powerful financial-industrial groups that want their “own” people in the Duma. Polls indicate that the Communist Party will win the largest number of votes in the party preference contest and its strength in the poor, industrial “Red Belt” regions should carry the Party to first place in the “single-member district” contest. The campaign has been a wild one, with “war” becoming the dominant theme in a variety of ways. (Will powerful regional bosses turn the new Duma into a “bog”? Read Gelman p.11. How active are parties in the districts? Read Golosov p.14.)
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PUTIN’S ANTI-TERRORIST WAR
If presidential elections were held on December 19 instead of June 4, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (pictured) would almost certainly be elected. He came out of nowhere to reach such political heights largely on the strength of his decisive and surprisingly successful military operation in Chechnya. A VTsIOM poll shows that 69% of Russians want the Chechen campaign to continue. If Western media audiences see mainly carnage and refugees, ordinary Russians are extremely hopeful that they have at last found someone capable of standing up for them after years of economic and geopolitical defeat. Most Russians see Putin’s actions as a resolute response to Chechnya-based terrorism, which they hold responsible for a series of ruthless residential bombings that killed about 300 people in September in the cities of Moscow and Volgodonsk. The Prime Minister has thereby been steadily stealing the “stability” and “Russian revival” vote that had been the core support of his main rivals, ex-Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov.
The Russian military campaign has commanded a rare unanimity among Russian political leaders, including Luzhkov and Primakov. When market-reformist presidential candidate Grigory Yavlinsky (pictured) dared to suggest that Russia declare a temporary cease-fire in order to let women and children escape and to give Chechnya a harsh ultimatum, he drew high-powered fire from opponents as diverse as Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and free-marketeer Anatoly Chubais. Chubais branded him a traitor and has sought to make this a wedge issue between his own Union of Right-Wing Forces and Yavlinsky’s Yabloko Party.
ELECTION-RELATED WEBSITES
Central Election Commission: www.fci.ru
Int’l Foundation for Electoral Studies: www.ifes.ru
RFE/RL Russian Election Report: www.rferl.org/elections/russia99report
Russia Votes (polls): www.RussiaVotes.org
VTsIOM (polls): www.wciom.ru
ROMIR (polls): www.romir.ru
Public Opinion Foundation (polls): www.fom.ru
EWI Regional Reports: www.iews.org/rrrabout.nsf
Carnegie Endowment: www.ceip.org
Yabloko: www.yabloko.ru
Union of Right-Wing Forces: www.pravdelo.ru
Zhirinovsky: www.ldpr.ru
Communist Party: www.kprf.ru
Luzhkov: www.luzhkov-otechestvo.ru
Russian National Unity (Spas): www.rne.org
Yavlinsky’s own ally, former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, also distanced himself from this plan, say-
ing that there could be no pause in the military operation.
Putin waited until the end of November, however, to endorse a political party, the Unity bloc created with strong Kremlin participation. While Putin declined actually to join the bloc, his endorsement catapulted Unity to 18% support in the polls from just 9% the week before. Many Putin supporters, however, continue to back the party of Luzhkov and Primakov, Fatherland-All Russia, which now stands in third place. (Does a Constitutional crisis await Russia if Fatherland-All Russia does well? Markov thinks it might, p.16.)
Some of Putin’s most fateful decisions, however, lie ahead. Russian troops now ring the Chechen capital Grozny, and if he chooses the wrong moment to move in, or decides to chase the rebels into the treacherous mountains, public attitudes to the operation could sour. (How stable is Putin’s pro-war support? Read Bunin and Makarenko, p.9)
MEDIA WAR
The battle of the airwaves between the Kremlin “Family” and Fatherland-All Russia has become
one of the most colorful features of the 1999 campaign. Russia’s most popular TV program, the Ser-
gei Dorenko show carried by Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky’s ORT network, has maintained a steady barrage of attacks on Luzhkov. Over the last two months, Dorenko (pictured) has blasted Luzhkov for lying, for alleged corruption within Moscow’s immense state bureaucracy and for controlling the city’s courts, where he sues opponents regularly and almost always wins. In a country where 85% of the population believes that a majority of officials are corrupt, Russians did not find such allegations hard to believe. Indeed, similar stories may explain why no sitting big-city mayor has ever won the presidency in the United States. More wildly, however, Dorenko went on to accuse Luzhkov of consorting with “Scientologists” and to link him to the murder of a Western hotel owner and Primakov to an assassination attempt against Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze (in neither case with much evidence). Just mentioning the name “Luzhkov,” growled Dorenko two weeks ago, in and of itself makes the campaign a dirty one. Luzhkov has sued for libel. (Is this the dirtiest campaign in post-Soviet Russia? Read Nikonov p.20)
The Fatherland-All Russia team has proven unable to blunt the effects of this smear campaign despite receiving friendly coverage from other mass media (especially Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV network). At first, Luzhkov issued evidence that Dorenko’s charges were false and challenged the commentator to a live debate, but this never took place because neither wanted to appear on the other’s network. At one point, even the cool-headed Primakov unexpectedly called up the host of NTV’s rival show (“Itogi”) in the middle of a broadcast to express his outrage after watching one Dorenko segment. He succeeded mainly in embarrassing Itogi’s host by revealing that he had been watching Dorenko instead of NTV.
Clearly, many of Fatherland-All Russia’s responses have not been coordinated. One usually cautious regional leader allied with Luzhkov, Bashkortostan’s Murtaza Rakhimov (pictured), went so far as to ban the local broadcast of Dorenko’s program on November 21. Drawing heavy fire from politicians across the political spectrum, including Primakov, Rakhimov eventually relented. The Luzhkov-Primakov team is now trying to regroup, creating its own “investigative” program on its own channel on the same night as Dorenko’s show. Much damage has already been done, however. Luzhkov declared at the end of November that he will not be running for president and will focus on the mayoral race in Moscow, where his support remains above 70%. (For how Primakov might still win the presidency, read Boxer p.7)
Other Kremlin opponents now wonder when their time will come. So far, Kremlin media have attacked only the Fatherland-All Russia team, leaving other forces like the Communists and Yabloko essentially untouched. This recalls the Kremlin strategy of 1996, when it successfully skewed media coverage to ensure that the presidential runoff was between Yeltsin and Communist leader Zyuganov, who then had only minimal chances to win since the media predictably lined up against him in the runoff. If the plan is to do the same in 2000 with Putin in Yeltsin's place, it could even welcome a “red” Duma as an added foil to campaign against. The Kremlin’s unspoken but apparent strategy is to “do 1996 again.”
THE LEGAL WAR
Russia’s electoral law and underdeveloped court system have opened up great opportunities for the abuse of the election system. In an attempt to force candidates to be forthright and to keep the campaign clean, the law gives a very detailed list of ‘dos and don’ts’ for candidates. For example, all materials distributed by a candidate during the campaign must clearly indicate that they were paid for from the candidate's government-monitored campaign fund. The problem is that the law gives little instruction on when a “violation” should lead to disqualification.
Thus, as reported last month, the Central Election Commission chose to disqualify Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) because one of its top three leaders did not report ownership of a house as required by law, but forgave Yabloko leader Yavlinsky’s failure to report over $3,000 in income. In November, the Russian Ministry of Justice used a different technicality to remove another disliked opponent, the proto-fascist movement Spas (representatives pictured above). After failing to stop the Central Election Commission from registering
Spas, the Ministry managed to win a court ruling that Spas did not have enough regional organizations to be classified as a federal movement (necessary to be on the Duma ballot) and that it had therefore falsified registration documents. Spas is appealing the case.
Analogous problems have been occurring on the local level. District election commissions are often loyal to their governors and find ways to disqualify candidates they do not like, including incumbent legislators, as appears to have happened in two of Bashkortostan’s six districts, for example. Furthermore, savvy candidates have spent a great deal of energy collecting information on technical violations by their competitors, revealing them strategically to remove or hinder opponents.
UPCOMING REGIONAL RACES
On December 19, Moscow, Moscow Region (the area around Moscow where the Communists’ second-in-command Gennady Seleznev is running), Orenburg, Primorsky Krai, St. Petersburg, Vologda, Yaroslavl and Tatarstan will hold regional legislative or gubernatorial elections. The most high-profile race is in Moscow, where incumbent Luzhkov (pictured) remains the overwhelming favorite, now polling at 73% despite his decline in the presidential polls. The Berezovsky-controlled ORT network has begun to give a major push to one of his opponents, Pavel Borodin, the Russian Presidential Representative in Moscow. Borodin has been implicated in widely reported Kremlin corruption scandals and had the support of just 1% in the same poll. Other notable candidates include Union of Right-Wing Forces leader and former Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko (who is mainly using the mayoral race to advertise his bloc for the Duma race and is polling 8%) and Alexei Mitrofanov, one of Zhirinovsky’s top deputies and ideologues in the LDPR.
The other high-profile race is taking place in St. Petersburg, where political tensions are running high as incumbent Governor Vladimir Yakovlev (Fatherland-All Russia’s number-three leader) has unleashed a no-holds-barred campaign against the city’s Yabloko leader, Igor Artemiev, and the deputy head
of the federal Auditing Chamber (and former Yabloko member), Yuri Boldyrev. First, Yakovlev’s supporters in the legislature reportedly violated rules of order so as to move the date of the election up from the spring to December 19, when he figures to get a boost from the federal Fatherland-All Russia campaign. Then, in late November, city police arrested and fined opposition Yabloko activists for distributing leaflets listing what they said were Yakovlev’s broken election promises, confiscating the leaflets. Both cases are now in court and Yakovlev denies any wrongdoing.
CAMPAIGN SNAPSHOTS
Unity is seeking to attach itself firmly to Putin’s coattails, declaring to voters that “Unity supports Putin and Putin relies on Unity. And this is a union of victors.” Deliberately avoiding any hint of a program, the bloc has also released a series of slick ads featuring its top three leaders, carefully chosen for political hygiene: Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu, Jesse Ventura-like wrestler Aleksandr Karelin, and famed corruption fighter Aleksandr Gurov. Russia needs saving (Shoigu), strength (Karelin), and honesty (Gurov), the bloc declares.