Putin's flawed democracy

Putin's flawed democracy

In a Yekaterinburg university classroom in Russia's snowy northern Urals this week, Grigory Yavlinsky was in full flow. Students listened attentively to his message that President Vladimir Putin was re-creating a one-party state.

The only problem was he should have been giving a different speech.

For six months, Yavlinsky had expected to be keynote speaker at a conference on Russia's declining population being held on the same premises.

The night before, organisers called him to say his presence was not required. As a consolation, he could address an economics class. Such is life for an opposition leader campaigning for Russia's parliamentary elections on December 2 - even one who, unlike some more radical groups, remains within the system of "approved" parties that has emerged under Putin's Kremlin.

It is a life where meetings and appearances can suddenly be cancelled, election leaflets confiscated, or advertising yanked at the last moment. Yavlinsky said his Yabloko party had just had 100 billboards in St Petersburg taken down, apparently after official pressure on the site-owners.

The fiercely intelligent economist seems an unlikely bogeyman for the authorities. He has twice been a presidential candidate, though winning at best 7 per cent of the vote in 1996. He is wittily persuasive in public appearances, but hardly a rabble-rouser.

Meanwhile, splits in the liberal camp, and its associations in the public memory with the depredations of the 1990s shift to a market economy, mean Yabloko will almost certainly not pass the 7 per cent of votes needed under new rules to get into parliament this time.

With Yabloko set to have no representation for the first time since 1993, pollsters say some former supporters are shifting to United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party expected to win 60 per cent-plus, rather than waste their votes.

Mobilised

But such an array of what Russians call "administrative resources", or support from media, law enforcement and officialdom, has been mobilised behind United Russia that even marginal parties like Yabloko say they cannot campaign in peace.

Party aides say Yabloko's banned St Petersburg billboards had already been toned down under official pressure. A veiled swipe at plans by Gazprom, the gas monopoly, to build a controversial skyscraper in the historic city was swapped for the anodyne "A vote for Yabloko is a vote for St Petersburg". Yavlinsky said vehicles carrying its campaign leaflets in the Urals were repeatedly stopped for up to three hours by police who misused their legal right to check the contents.

Yabloko complained to Russia's central electoral commission and interior ministry this week about a series of alleged violations, including pressure on its voters in some areas.

In Russia as elsewhere TV exposure is a potent campaign tool. Yavlinsky managed three TV interviews in Yekaterinburg, Russia's fifth-biggest city, and got on to the air in several other cities. Aides say they tailored his campaign programme to avoid locations where it had been made clear he would not be welcome on TV.

Yet if Yabloko is finding it difficult to get its message across, United Russia, even with Putin heading its candidate list and the lion's share of TV time, seems to be struggling to excite Russians. On Yekaterinburg's streets this week, as many as three in four citizens expressed little interest in the elections.

At the local ESTV station, Elena Savitskaya, editor-in chief, said voter apathy, perhaps a byproduct of the lack of real competition, now seemed the authorities' biggest concern.

/D.P.