DUMA FACTIONS
| |
This analysis
is based on Christer Pursiainen's and Ira Jänis's text in The Condition
of Democracy in
The winner of the 1999 Duma elections, KPRF has 83 seats in present Duma. Gennadi Zyuganov - who lost the presidential elections on the second ballot to Boris Yeltsin in 1996 and on the first to Vladimir Putin in 2000 - is the leader of the party. KPRF was also the largest single party in the Duma elected in 1995, with 121 deputies in its faction in the Duma.
The KPRF was originally meant to gather the various national-patriotic and communist forces into a single great alliance for the 1999 Duma elections. However, by spring 1999 it was already apparent that the various national-patriotic groupings which had worked with the KPRF in the 1996 presidential elections would not be joining the alliance in the 1999 elections.
Nevertheless the KPRF spoke formally of the For Victory electoral alliance, as its lists contained candidates from the Agrarian Party of Russia (APR), which had now split into two wings. A number of other politicians, dissatisfied with their own parties defected to the KPRF. The KPRF entered the election with unchanged policies, stressing the differences between itself and the old Soviet nomenclatura and the practices of Soviet Communism, and emphasising its readiness to work in co-operation with other parties.
The party spoke in favour of a multiform economy, which would allow certain forms of private ownership. The KPRF issued its own economic programme for the elections. Sergei Glazev was the architect of the programme, originally known as a radical proponent of economic reform, who began his career in political economy in 1992 as Foreign Trade Minister. The Communists welcomed Glazev with open arms, as they saw his "defection" as proving their thesis that the programme of market economy reform was bankrupt, and that all reasonable people were willing to admit this.
The KPRF's election manifesto proclaimed the values of justice, the leading role of the State, democracy, spiritual values and patriotism. According to the KPRF, these are the core values of socialism. The KPRF would like to see the nationalisation of key strategic industries and a constitutional reform, which would make the government responsible to the people. The party promised to pay the State's arrears in wages, pensions and stipends, cut fuel prices, create favourable conditions for domestic industry, and in this way end unemployment and reduce inflation.
The KPRF is opposed to the sale of land. It promised to sack incompetent officials, ban extreme political movements and bring before the courts the criminals who have robbed the people. It stressed its desire to restore the Russian people's pride in themselves and their culture, reunite all fraternal nations - particularly Belarus and Ukraine - with the common motherland, and ensure both internal and external security by strengthening the army. The KPRF proposed the restoration of traditional alliances in the international arena, and took a clear position in opposition to both NATO and the United States.
The Unity faction has in the present Duma with 82 seats. The electoral alliance Unity (Edinstvo) - or "The Bear" (Medved), as it is also known - was put together at the eleventh hour in September 1999. Rumours abound in Russia about its establishment and who was behind it. According to the official version, the proposal to set up the alliance was initiated and signed by 39 governors who were dissatisfied with the existing parties and electoral alliances. However, most commentators believe that the prime mover behind the initiative was actually the Kremlin, which feared the popularity of the OVR.
Adoption of the popular Minister for State Emergencies, Sergei Shoigu, as Unity's figurehead surprised everybody. Unity was both criticised and praised for the fact that it did not have any formal political programme to build a better future for the country. It openly declared its goal of achieving a position as one of the "parties of power", and did not seek to disguise the support it received from the Kremlin.
Unlike its competitors, Unity received considerable support from the Kremlin, as a result of which many previously declared supporters of the OVR or Our Home Is Russia switched their allegiance to Unity. During the election campaign, Unity's cause was promoted by an unusually straightforward smear campaign against its competitors - primarily the OVR - by the media outlets under the control of the Kremlin and the present elite.
OVR - the Unity's competitor in the elections - has 53 seats in the present Duma. Fatherland- All Russia (OVR) electoral alliance was long expected to be one of the main contenders in the 1999 Duma elections. The OVR was founded in August 1999 when the "Fatherland" and "All Russia" movements, based on regional power elites, decided to join forces. A figurehead for the alliance was found in the person of the former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Yevgeni Primakov. Later in the autumn, the Agrarian Communist APR, which by then had divided into a more hard-line and a more moderate wing, decided to join the alliance. The OVR included about a dozen other small parties, of which some eventually merged with either Fatherland or All Russia.
In November 1998, the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, founded the Fatherland movement and its support was particularly strong in the capital. Luzhkov said that the ideological model for the movement derived from the Swedish social democracy, and his aim was to make it the leading force in Russian social democracy. Immediately after it was launched, the Fatherland movement was able to bring in several small parties of the centre left. Luzhkov also managed to attract several heavyweight politicians and experts sacked by Yeltsin to take up leading positions in the movement.
All Russia is a movement founded in spring 1999 by Tatarstan president Mintimer Shaymiev. In the run-up to the elections, the movement included among its members several of Russia's influential regional leaders, including the presidents of Ingushia and Bashkortostan plus the governors of St. Petersburg and Astrakhan. The movement declared its concern over the number of parties which it considered had set back Russia's development by half a decade. Their objective was to achieve a Duma supportive of the views of the regional leaders.
The OVR electoral alliance was criticised from the start as a new "party of power". Certainly, the alliance initially attracted support from the sort of people who had previously belonged to Viktor Chernomyrdin's party, Our Home is Russia. The most prominent role, however, was reserved for the regional leaders. Indeed, OVR can be considered to mark a new departure in Russian national politics in which the key role lay with the regional leaders.
The OVR's line in the elections was to offer a moderate alternative
to the policies of the Kremlin. It championed reforms to the Constitution
and to the position of the President, legislative and economic reforms
and reforms in the social sector, furthermore, it expressed support
for a protectionist economic policy and the protection of
The Union of Right Forces (SPS), which has 31 seats in the present Duma, represent clearly right-wing liberal values and was set up at the last moment in August 1999, expressly to take part in the elections. Prior to that there had been all sorts of attempts at co-operation in an effort to bring the scattered forces of liberalism together under one roof. In the end, the electoral alliance was formed by the Right Cause alliance, the party New Force, and the remnants of the Voice of Russia movement. Right Cause was the vehicle for the former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar's Russia's Democratic Choice Party, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov's Young Russia, and the Duma's popular woman deputy Irina Khakamada's Common Cause. New Force was, in turn founded by former Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko, while the Voice of Russia movement was led by the Governor of Samara Oblast, Konstantin Titiov.
The SPS brought together the most important of Russia's genuine right-wing forces, and on the eve of the elections published its Right-Wing Manifesto. The SPS manifesto considered freedom an essential guarantee of democracy and identifies it as the alliance's most important value. It took a strong stand against the ideology of the national patriots. The SPS believes life in Russia should be governed by the universal human values of freedom and democracy. The alliance further believes that 80-85 per cent of Russia's GDP should be produced by enterprises in the private sector. It champions the break-up of monopolies, the free market and strong financial institutions.
The manifesto outlined a social security network in which responsibility is shared between the State, the employers and the general public, and a pension system in which private pension institutions are placed on an equal footing with the State. The SPS considers the most important function of the State to be ensuring compliance with the new law.
In a similar manner to Unity, SPS benefited from the support of Putin, when just before the elections he praised their views on the economy. The SPS ran a successful campaign, concentrating its efforts on the young and on the heartland of the country. In addition to Putin's declaration of support, the most decisive factor behind the success of the SPS is undoubtedly its declaration of support for the war in Chechnya. In the result of this campaigning the SPS managed to beat its competitor - Yabloko.
The Yabloko faction has only 17 seats in the present Duma, which is only half of the number of seats that it had in the previous Duma. Grigori Yavlinski's Yabloko was expected in the run-up to the elections to have real chance of success. Yabloko had long been seen as a party of the naäve idealist condemned to perpetual opposition. However, for the 1999 elections it sought to maximise its potential vote by heading its list of candidates with the former Prime Minister Sergei Stepahsin. Yabloko, the only party in the elections to take a critical stance on Chechnya, lost a considerable slice of votes, possibly for this very reason, to the SPS, whose election tactics included campaigning against Yabloko.
Grigori Yavlinski, Yuri Boldyrev and Vladimir Lukin originally set up Yabloko as an electoral alliance for the 1993 elections. The name Yabloko was formed out of its founders' surnames, and in English means 'apple'. Three parties backed the founders: the Republican Party of the Russian Federation, the Social Democratic Party of Russia and the Christians of Russia. The alliance performed fairly well, receiving some eight per cent of the votes. Early in 1995, Yabloko registered as a political association. Before the 1995 elections, Yabloko lost one of its founding members with the resignation of Yuri Boldyrev. Its electoral performance was poorer than the previous time, at just under seven per cent of the votes. But this was still enough to give Yabloko a fairly sizeable faction in Duma.
Yabloko brought its own manifesto for the December 1999 elections, in which it put forward a ten-year programme to put Russia back on its feet. One of its leading ideas was to remove the element of unpredictability from Russian politics by creating a stable political climate in the country. Yabloko saw this unpredictability as one of the main reasons for Russia's economic difficulties. Its removal would attract both domestic and foreign investment which would improve the social and economic situation of the Russian people. The manifesto also included essential constitutional and other legislative reforms. The party's overall goal is to secure the interests of both the State and the people.
Yabloko champions many liberal causes, such as low taxation, better environment for entrepreneurship, competition, the break-up of monopolies and the rights of consumers. At the same time, it also espouses social democratic causes such as pension reform, secure income policy and preservation of the education system. Viewed close up, Yabloko can indeed be seen to be composed of two wings, liberals and social democrats, which some representatives of the party even see as potential prototypes for a new Russian two-party system.
The smallest party in the present Duma is Vladimir Zhirinovsky's party, Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) that has only 13 seats in the Duma. However, the LDPR did not formally take apart in the 1999 elections. Zhirinovsky founded a new electoral alliance, Zhirinovsky's Bloc, when his party was disqualified from participating in the elections because of irregularities with its lists of candidates. Members of the LDPR had failed to disclose the extent to their property holdings and income, while one of the first of three names on the party list was wanted by the authorities in connection with several offences. Under Russia's electoral law, if one of the leading names or a certain percentage of other names on a party's list is disqualified or changed, the whole party is prevented from taking part in the elections.
The decision of the Central Electoral Commission aroused a great deal of controversy and its chairman was accused of overreacting. Zhirinovsky himself did not seem upset at the decision; he merely convened an emergency meeting of the party and together with the party of a relative and a youth movement close to the LDPR, set up Zhirinovsky's Bloc to allow him to return to the electoral arena.
The electoral alliance's change of name had no influence on policies of the party, which in many people's opinion are on any given day the same thing as any statement which Zhirinovsky himself chooses to make. The LDPR was founded originally in 1989, when it went by the name of the Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union. It became the LDPR in 1992. The party took part in the elections of 1993 and 1995 and confounded the opinion pollsters by doing well. In 1993, it attracted close on 23 per cent of the vote, and in 1995 almost 12 per cent.
Although the LDPR speaks for national-patriotism, especially in the field of foreign policy, the party has described itself as standing at the centre right with unshakeable patriotic convictions. It sees its most important task as being to stand up for Russia's national interests. It has also continued to call noisily for the creation of a new Russian Empire, extending further than ever before. The LDPR is in favour of a strong presidency and authoritarian government.
Zhirinovsky's ten-point programme for the 1999 elections emphasised the role of a strong army and a strong Ministry of the Interior to prevent Russia becoming the playground of the West and "southern bandits". The programme also saw the development of domestic industrial and agricultural production as a means to resist Western attempts to reduce Russia to a mere source of raw materials and cheap labour. The LDPR places the focus of foreign policy on the south, where it believes Russia can find its potential allies. But at the same time it sees the south as a potential threat and a possible source of war.
According to Zhirinovsky, the subjects of the Russian Federation should be reduced from the present 89 to around 20. This would both save money and prevent ethnic conflicts. He further has suggested amnesty for all who return the capital they have exported from Russia.
Duma factions
Determining the composition of the Duma on the basis of the election results is a fairly complex process, due to the combination of the party list elections, based on a voting threshold and the parallel election of deputies from single mandate districts, the break-up of electoral alliances after the elections, and the formation of new coalitions between deputies both with and without party affiliations. The results of the 1999 elections did not give a majority to any single party or coalition in the new Duma. However, one can say that the balance of decision-making power in the chamber has shifted towards the centre, compared to the previous Duma. Moreover, the Kremlin has now for the first time in its history real power to influence the decision making process in the Duma trough the pro-Kremlin parties and factions, who enjoy the majority in the present Duma.
Apart from the actual election results, the structure of the Duma and distribution of seats in the chamber are also influenced by the fact that those parties which failed to reach the voting threshold in the party list elections, and groups of deputies who share to even some extent similar views, will attempt to form their own groups. This is a direct consequence of the final years of the Soviet Union, when voting behaviour in the Supreme Soviet was determined by membership of different groupings within the Soviet Communist Party. Factions and groups also operated within the Russian Supreme Soviet dissolved by Yeltsin, whose deputies were elected to represent electoral districts.
The new Duma elected in 1993, while being politically fragmented, inherited the problems of its predecessor, decided to retain the system of factions and groups in order to secure the chamber's political weight and ability to function. For this reason, it was agreed that those parties which reached the voting threshold would automatically be accorded the status of a faction in the Duma. The others would have to form groups of at least 35 deputies in order to be entitled, for example, to representation in the governing bodies of the chamber or various rights of initiative or infrastructure rights.
It has not been made compulsory to join these factions or groups, but to remain outside means, in practice, to surrender the opportunity of wielding influence or speaking in the chamber. Thus, there will be inevitably more factions and groups in the Duma than parties elected to the chamber from the party lists. In fact, factions and groups can be viewed as a part of a Russian party system, since these some of them have a longer history in the Duma than many of the present Duma parties.
When viewing the development of the factions and groups starting from the first Duma in 1993, one notices a similar development with the party system. In the 1993 Duma, 18 different factions and groups were operating, but only nine of them lasted in 1995 Duma. Besides the parties in the present Duma, some of these factions have been functioning from the start in 1993. Groups such as Agro-Industrial group and Regions of Russia can be seen as the same structures as the New Regional Politics and Agrarian Union in the 1993 Duma and Russian Regions and Agrarian Deputies in the 1995 Duma. And as their names indicate, they represent more articulate interest groups in Russian politics.
The role of the Duma groups is also bound with the fact that half of the deputies are elected from single-mandate districts. The election of single-mandate districts also differs somewhat from party list elections in a way that the party alignment of the candidate is played down. The tendency in single-mandate elections is to vote for the person and not the party, which is the reason why so many candidates do not reveal their party connections. Moreover, many of the elected deputies do not affiliate with any party but the dominant economic power in their region. These deputies tend to stay outside the party factions in the Duma and join in the groups of "independent" deputies.
However, the party factions and groups of "independent" deputies are not isolated from each other. Even though groups might have a clear position on some questions, such as in land sale or taxation, in most cases their voting patterns are open to negotiation. In most cases groups are considered to be as "satellites" to the dominant parties. In the Duma elected in 1995, Agrarian Deputies were considered to be aligned to the KPRF and in the present Duma both Regions of Russia and the People's Deputies are seen as the brancheis of the United Russa (former Unity) party. According to this view, the pro-Kremlin United Russia has dominant position over KPRF.
During the run-up to the elections, before the results of the actual ballot were available, many of the parties were already speculating on their possible co-operating partners within the New Duma. When it still seemed possible that the OVR would end up winning the elections, its most likely collaborators were thought to be the KPRF and Yabloko. The Unity movement, for its part, considered the SPS and Yabloko to be its closest allies. The first surprise news in the new Duma was the striking up of an alliance between the KPRF and Unity and their agreement with the non-aligned deputies and the Zhirinovsky faction over the post of Speaker and the number of committees in the new chamber.
In terms of power within the Duma, the important elements, in addition to the factions themselves, are the various legislative committees and the relatively influential Duma Council, which is composed of the chairmen of the factions and groups, plus the speaker and deputy speaker of the chamber. The function of the Duma Council is linked to the history of the first Duma elected in 1993. At that time, the first task facing the new chamber was to draft the standing orders governing its own working procedures.
The process was overshadowed by the traumatic events of 1993, and there was accordingly a wish to deny the speaker of the new Duma the sort of powers which had been enjoyed by the former chairman of the dissolved Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Kahsbulatov, and to ensure that the new Duma would become an institution which could be taken seriously within the framework of the new presidential model of government. The opposition and the reformers agreed together that the Duma Council would oversee the powers of the speaker of the Duma. The agreement reached in 1993 guaranteed the reformers, who were in the minority, a representation on the Duma Council at least equal to the number of seats they held in the chamber, and thus served as a balancing factor in the power struggle within the Duma.
The factions and legislative committees in the Duma have parallel, and indeed often overlapping roles and opportunities to exert influence. This sort of dual system originates from a wish to bind the work of the committees to the parties and power relationships in the Duma. The original idea, whereby there would be about a dozen committees, each of which would be, in effect, a "mini Duma" in terms of its internal political relations, has long since been abandoned.
The many factions and their leaders have each demanded committee chairmanships, which has led to an increase in the number of committees in order to preserve "industrial peace" within the chamber. As an example, there were 28 committees in the Duma elected in 1995. These committees often dealt with the same issues, and their composition did not accurately reflect the political balance of power within the chamber. The lack of co-ordination between the committees and the factions and the inability of committee chairmen to co-operate with each other has especially hampered the drafting of legislation and has been particularly noticeable in approving the budget.
In the first sessions of the present Duma, the KPRF was awarded a package deal of a total of nine committee chairmanships, Unity six, the People's Deputies group five, the Agro-Industrial group two and the LDPR one. The "minority", as the OVR, Yabloko and SPS was then called, was left with just four chairmanships between them. They wanted to increase the number of committees by setting up a committee for EU relations and an anti-monopoly committee, both issues important to reformers, but without success. Former Speaker Gennadi Seleznev, a member of the KPRF, who enjoys good relations with the Kremlin, was re-appointed Speaker of the new Duma, while Unity's Lyubov Sliska, an unknown first-timer, was appointed First Deputy Speaker.
Since the first sessions of the new Duma, the balance of power has changed dramatically and new alliances have been made. Soon after the package deal when the committee chairmanships were distributed, Unity made a new alliance with OVR, SPS, Yabloko and groups of independent deputies to ratify the START II agreement leaving the KPRF and LDPR in opposition. Then in the late spring it allied itself again with the Communists to vote for the old Soviet national anthem. The Kremlin has used skilfully the Unity faction and groups of independent deputies to push through all its legislative initiatives in the new Duma.
The Communist party's influence and authority has shrunk further, especially when the new Land Code, which allows the ownership and sale of the land was passed and the committee chairmanships were redistributed. The former Kremlin opponent - OVR - has also publicly announced that its policy is to support the Kremlin's initiatives. Although the Communists have the largest faction in the new Duma, it has been, with only a few exceptions, a very cooperative partner with the Kremlin. With the unconditional support of Unity, the People's Deputies, and the Regions of Russia and with support of OVR, the Kremlin has, for the first time, a majority support in the Duma.