#11
Russian Democrats' Pre-Election Unification Chances
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Izvestiya
11 June 2002
[translation for personal use only]
Report by Andrey Kolesnikov: "The Broken Guitar"
The Russian democratic movement has approached the pinnacle of the next stage in its development, which is invariably achieved at the very beginning of the pre-election period: Once again, the debate about uniting all the democratic forces has begun. The last serious access of mutual atraction was seen exactly three years ago when many democratic leaders started talking about the possibility of uniting for the sake of victory at the elections. Everything ended in an even deeper divide, and even remembering how, after Galina Starovoytova's death in November 1998, the democrats linked arms (in the literal sense of the word), has become somewhat awkward.
And now Boris Nemtsov, leader of the Union of Right-Wing Forces [SPS], has undertaken an attempt to gather together the pieces of the Russian democratic movement's "broken guitar". He proposed a theoretically logical mechanism according to which the Democratic party performing most successfully at the coming parliamentary elections gets the opportunity to nominate its presidential candidate, who would be supported by all the democratic movements. An immediate reaction followed: Other leaders treated the idea highly suspiciously, Grigoriy Yavlinskiy accused the current lSPS leaders of having themselves been to blame at some point for the split, and Liberal Russia simply cursed Nemtsov.
Those who once "linked arms" are again about to "disappear one by one" with a stubbornness worthy of better application. One of the chief arguments against uniting is that Vladimir Putin will remain president in any case. It is difficult to argue with that. But it is also difficult to argue with the fact that if the Russian democrats do not nominate a single candidate, the right-wing liberal opposition in Russia could commit suicide. In other words, life will of course continue after death. But each of the democratic parties will, with a greater or lesser degree of success, cultivate its own kitchen-garden without any chance of jointly cultivatingany useful democratic wonder-fruit.
The right-wingers' problem is that their electorate, in its present form and alsofaced with the existence of several waring democratic parties, is divided. Generally it is difficult to mobilize for elections people such as, for example, those young people "who do not remember the kinship" and history of Russia, while others from among successful Russian yuppies with right-wing views yet conformist aims in life will willingly vote for the party toward which the president points his finger. Others will prefer the Union of Right-Wing Forces, and the classical democrats from among the intellectual professions' intelligentsia and workers in the budget-funded sphere will probably give their votes to Yabloko. It appears that nothing at all can be assembled out of the fragments of this "broken guitar", and that it is simpler to make a new, modernized, contemporary one, perhaps even with elements of sixties' styling, so that at least absolutely everybody might be content with its sound quality. Strictly speaking, Nemtsov's proposal comes to exactly that.
At first view it appears Utopian. Russia's political history over recent years does in fact show that uniting the democrats at federal level has not been too successful an experiment. Overcoming the deep mutual hostility between Anatoliy Chubays and Grigoriy Yavlinskiy is impossible. Comparing the positions of Boris Nemtsov and Sergey Kirienko today is not at all easy. The SPS and the classical democrats are united only by an equally respectful attitude towards Yegor Gaydar. But these are all emotional categories with nothing to do with the pragmatic strategy and tactics of revolutionary battle requiring unity, even if it is temporary. Moreover, the history of even the previous election campaign shows that at a regional level the democratic parties know how to negotiate: That is the only way to survive beyond the Garden Ring.
With regard to the actual content of the issue, the democrats do have people and things to be allied against. With the establishment of democratic institutions, human rights, the fight against extremism and nazism, the rational manning of the army, and statization of business and the mass media in Russia, not everything is easy, to put it mildly. Even the economy, which is now considered an area completely controlled by liberal economists, represents an all-round "unfinished job", a rather gloomy landscape of uncompleted target for reforms- from the pension to the housing and municipal reforms.
Russia is not the only country where right-wing liberal forces are represented by several parties. Even in France there are two notable parties of this kind. And the impetus for uniting ttheir positions usually turns out to be some serious external shock , something akin to the appearance on the scene of Le Pen. So should one wait for the arrival of a Russian Le Pen for the democrats to finally unite?
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