Tiny parties could mushroom after the Kremlin eases their registration in its ongoing political reform process, but only a few will have credible chances to become meaningful political players in the next several years, analysts said.
Key to their survival will be how well they sense genuine public demands, find new charismatic leaders, gain financial backing and are able to mobilize dedicated supporters in the Russian provinces, the pundits said.
“There is a public demand for new ideas and new faces across the entire ideological spectrum,” Alexei Makarkin, analyst with the Center of Political Technologies Moscow-based think-tank, said.
About 70 parties have lined up for registration after new rules as of mid-March, among them the Subtropical Party, the Love Party and at least two Pensioners’ Parties. In December, President Dmitry Medvedev called for easing party registration requirements after tens of thousands protested in Moscow and other Russian cities, claiming gross violations during the parliamentary election campaign and vote fraud in favor of the ruling United Party.
In 1999, a total of 169 parties participated in the elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian parliament. But only seven lived to participate in two latest elections after the Kremlin tightened rules in mid-2000s, obliging parties to have a minimum of 50,000 members nationwide.
The minimum membership is being slashed to 500, according to the Medvedev’s draft bill that is to be considered by the upper chamber, the Federation Council, on Wednesday.
Ideology
Analysts concurred that liberals and moderate nationalists, two prominent groups currently without parliamentary representation, are set to benefit from the party reform.
“There are no ideologies other than textbook ones, which includes liberals and nationalists,” said Sergei Mikheyev of the Center for Political Assessment.
Another ideological sector to face revamp are the left, despite the fact that there are already two parties to choose from – the Communist Party and the socialist A Just Russia, which was established as a pro-Kremlin project, both Mikheyev and Makarkin said.
“People are tired of voting for [Communist leader Gennady] Zyuganov,” Makarkin said. Zyuganov, a household name, has headed the party since its inception in 1993, but its banking on Soviet nostalgia and even mild Stalinism has alienated younger voters and limited its constituency to an ever-shrinking core of devoted pensioners.
Makarkin was more dismissive of the much-mulled idea for a Christian party, coined by several hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. “Religion-based parties are banned by law, and in any case, the believers are too deeply divided,” Makarkin said.
Head of the Russian Orthodox Christian church, Patriarch Kirill, criticized the opposition rallies and implicitly endorsed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as a presidential candidate, irking the protesters, between 19 and 28 percent of whom identified as Orthodox Christians, according to independent pollster Sreda, which polled 200 protesters at each of four biggest rallies in Moscow between December 24 and March 10.
But most current ideological tags are outdated and do not reflect reality, which means that niche parties that avoid subscribing to political ideologies are likely to gain in prominence, Mikheyev said.
Prospective niche groups include the Pensioners’ Party and a potential party to represent the country’s vocal and increasingly politicized motorist community, said independent analyst Artemy Pushkarev.
Resources
Running a party is a costly affair. Head of the Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said in March that a party needs 30 million rubles ($1 million) a month to operate. This is the lowest possible estimate for an old-school party with tens of thousands of members, said Galina Boldyreva, head of non-parliamentary Yabloko’s branch in Volgograd region.
“Regional branches get most of their funding from a party’s federal office,” she said. “We only pay for things like leaflets, posters, flag poles – usually out of our own pocket. We are activists, after all.”
The expenses will remain considerable because even a party of 500 members would be required to run at least 45 regional offices with full-time staff, Boldyreva said.
United Russia’s income stood at 2.4 billion rubles ($82 million) in 2010, the year before the parliamentary elections, according to the Central Elections Commission. Budgets of most other parties ranged from some 100 million to 430 million rubles, with the exception of The Right Cause, which only reported 18 million rubles.
Donations – primarily from organizations and businesses – as well as federal grants for parliamentary parties were the main sources of revenue for most parties, according to commission data.
The officially reported sums account for about 50 percent of most parties’ real budgets, the rest acquired under-the-table, said Indem think-tank’s party expert Yuri Korgunyuk.
In the 1990s, big businessmen used “dwarf parties” to join some electoral bloc and become legislators, obtaining immunity from persecution and adding extra weight to their public clout, said analyst Pushkarev. The usual price range for a “turnkey party,” created by professional spin doctors, was $250,000 to $1 million at the time, he said.
For entrepreneurs in the regions, party membership is still an important status booster, but by and large, nongovernmental organizations have overtaken parties as the main vehicle for entrepreneurs concerned with their public image, Pushkarev said.
Manpower
Party branches in the regions are often vehicles for local clans and have little to do with their parties’ ideologies, while regional support for a party depends on its involvement in local affairs and not general political slogans, analysts said.
Yabloko's to-do list for 2012 in Volgograd, for example, includes campaigns to divert a federal highway now passing through the city’s center and for more greenery in the city, as well as support of local small businesses, especially eco-friendly, said Boldyreva.
“Party performance in the regions depends on whether they have these crazies who are interested in such work,” a spin doctor who worked at political campaigns nationwide told RIA Novosti. He asked not to be identified, saying his job brooks no publicity.
Another major prerequisite to a party’s survival, if not success, is charismatic leadership. A new wave of charismatic politicians is around the corner, to be triggered by stagnation of regional elites which do not allow new faces, but are too clumsy to compete with the opposition in public politics, the spin doctor said.
He was echoed by Makarkin of the Center of Political Technologies, who said new parties will not succeed without charismatic leaders, though that alone is not enough to get them on top.
Planting the Seeds
The government hopes that the opposition parties will discredit the multiparty system through constant infighting, said analyst Nikolai Petrov, of the Moscow Carnegie Center.
The Kremlin’s reform may lead to fracturing the political opposition into dozens of perpetually squabbling “dwarf parties,” analysts and politicians said.
“Now the authorities will unleash the insects, and the opposition is done for,” Eduard Limonov, head of the unregistered radical party The Other Russia party, said on his blog.
But parties that meet all requirements – dedicated supporters, financial backing, honest ideology and charismatic leadership – stand a chance of edging out old players in legislatures of all levels, including the Duma, Makarkin said.
The way would not be easy, however, because the Kremlin retains enough leverage to hinder or cripple unwanted contenders through both legislative loopholes and control of state media.
The Kremlin’s reform upholds the ban on electoral blocs and keeps in place much of red tape that the government used in the past as a pretext to deny registration to unwanted opposition parties.
The government also maintains control over the propaganda-prone state television, which is losing ground to Internet, but still remains the main source of news for the majority of the population..
“We’re planting the seeds now,” said Petrov. “We’ll still need to water them and weed out the weak.”
