#16 - JRL 7301
St. Petersburg Times
August 22, 2003
Elections are Variations on a Familiar Theme
By Vladimir Kovalev
As Valentina Matviyenko's campaign cakewalk to the governor's seat in Smolny wanders on, a hackneyed phrase appears to have become the motto of many of the city's career politicians and officials: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
According to city-politics insiders, the jockeying to get new and retain old positions within City Hall has already begun. Given that there doesn't seem much left to do for the workers at Matviyenko's headquarters with regard to actually winning the campaign, they are probably happy to have other work to occupy their time. Instead of having to think up ways to get their candidate elected, Matviyenko's staff can now concentrate on deciding what St. Petersburg's next government is going to look like.
I would label the whole process rather cynical, if I wasn't so convinced that disgusting is a better word.
Even Acting Governor Alexander Beglov has joined the cynical (disgusting?) group of "joiners." The vice governor in charge of the administrative committee under former Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, Beglov is said to be trying to wrangle himself the construction-committee job under Smolny's next boss. And he appears to be in a hurry.
This week, the acting governor told us that the city had only set aside enough funds to pay for the gubernatorial elections if they only run one round (in the event that no candidate receives 50 percent of the votes in the first round, the City Charter calls for a run off between the top two vote getters). If a second round is required, Beglov says, it will end up hurting the city's budget. His proposed solution to the danger is for the city's voters to cast their ballots for the candidate that they think has the best chance of winning 50 percent. He might as well have suggested that the City Election Commission hand out ballots with one name on them. I'm sure that there are still people kicking around with enough experience in drawing up this type of ballot to offer advice. About the only political figures who don't appear to be falling all over each other in the joiners' rush are the other 10 candidates in the race. With regard to this group, Matviyenko and her campaign appear to have opted for a couple of new variations on our subject phrase.
The first is: "If they won't join you, make it look as if they already have."
This variation arrived in the form of a leaflet being distributed on the streets by Matviyenko workers with quotations from three of her opponents in the race, extolling her qualifications as a candidate for governor.
Mikhail Amasov, the head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly, is quoted as describing Matviyenko to news daily Kommersant as a "diplomatic and able to bring together different political forces." St. Petersburg Vice Governor Anna Markova, in an article that originally appeared in the daily Gazeta, said, "I have only heard positive things about [Matviyenko's] work and that, wherever she has worked, she has brought real advantages." Konstantin Sukhenko told the newspaper Sankt Petersburgskiye Vedomosti that, while he doesn't know Matviyenko personally, he considers her to be a "competent person with a lot of experience who knows the city and the whole country."
These are all pretty positive sounding endorsements of an opponent in an election race. The only problem is that when they were made - in the middle of March, just after Matviyenko had been named as presidential representative for the Northwest Region - she wasn't a campaign opponent at all. It's kind of like asking Boris Berezovky what he thinks of Vladimir Putin on New Years Day, 2000, and then using the quote as evidence of how he feels today.
Although this can't be called false campaigning from a legal standpoint, it's not the sort of literature you would expect from a candidate who, just two weeks ago, called on all candidates in the race to join in signing a manifesto she had authored calling for "clean and democratic elections."
The issue of clean and democratic elections gave us an opportunity to see another variation on the joiners theme: "If they won't join you at your place, you sure as hell shouldn't show up at theirs."
Monday saw a public meeting held inviting all of the gubernatorial candidates to take part in a discussion on principles for running a campaign without mudslinging or dirty tricks. Matviyenko was a no-show. To be fair, only four candidates bothered to attend, but I would have thought Matviyenko would have been willing to join a discussion of a topic that she, herself, chose to make a campaign issue almost from the outset.
I know that politics is never a pretty game, but the general dishonesty that seems to be involved in what is beginning to look more like a coronation than an election is frustrating. While, according to a survey conducted by the Agency of Social Information on Aug. 10, 68 percent of St. Petersburg residents believe Matviyenko will be the next governor, I can't believe that there aren't a lot of other people out there who feel the same frustration that I do.
But a conversation with one of those 68 percent the other day made me wonder why I bother complaining.
"It doesn't matter who I vote for. Everything has already been decided for us, so it doesn't make sense to vote at all," he said My protest that, as voters, it depends on us who wins, and that we should get out and cast ballots, was met with the response: "No, Matviyenko will win, and you know it as well as I do."
Perhaps this really is the way that most people think. But that doesn't necessarily make it right.
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