#11 - JRL 7304
gazeta.ru
August 27, 2003
Renegade leftist will hurt United Russia more than
Communists
By Yelena Rudneva
The new coalition of people’s patriotic forces being formed by the popular left-leaning economist and member of the Communist Party faction in the lower house Sergei Glazyev is highly likely to win seats in the State Duma at the parliamentary elections in December.
Such is the opinion of the country’s leading observers and political scientists. At the same time, many of them believe that, despite assumptions that the new bloc is designed to strip the Communists of votes, Glazyev and his supporters will most likely enter the lower house taking votes away, primarily, from United Russia and the People’s Deputy Group, and not the Communists.
That the relationship between the Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and Sergei Glazyev would deteriorate by autumn had been anticipated, but no-one expected that the breakup would take place before the Communist Party conference scheduled for September 6. As a result, sociologists have not managed to include the ‘CPRF economist’ in their monthly survey of party leaders’ popularity ratings.
The chairman of the Public Opinion Foundation, Alexander Oslon, commenting on the sociologists’ silence, said: ''Our polls follow the television picture – for our polls we choose subjects that receive wide coverage on TV. As for Glazyev, he has only just emerged on TV. Well, we cannot include all those who turn up on TV screens from time to time!''
At the same time, Oslon says that from now on the Foundation would thoroughly watch Glazyev’s ratings, and the first results of a survey aimed to assess his chances of entering the lower house will be published as early as next week.
Sergei Glazyev announced his plan to form a new bloc of people’s patriotic forces on the basis on the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO) and the Party of Russian Regions earlier this month. Glazyev will be joined at the top of the bloc’s electoral list by Dmitry Rogozin, formerly a member of the centrist People’s Deputy Group. Third place on the list, according to some sources, will be assigned to Alexander Krutov, an Orthodox Church fundamentalist, though other sources said it could be General Georgy Shpak, the former Airborne Troops commander.
Other prominent figures on the bloc’s electoral list are former chairman of the Russian Central Bank Viktor Gerashchenko and philosopher and leader of the Eurasia Party Alexander Dugin.
Rogozin has already been appointed the key person in charge of the bloc’s election campaign. Remarkably, the choice of Rogozin as the number two on the coalition’s list has caused the most heated debates on the new alliance’s prospects.
''Glazyev speaks of a coalition of leftist forces in opposition to the Kremlin and at the same time includes Dmitry Rogozin, who is not only allegiant to the executive power, but also a direct aide to the president! What kind of an opposition is that? But this is not the point,'' maintains the professor of political science at the Moscow State University and member of the governing body of the rightist SPS party, Alexei Kara-Murza.
In Kara-Murza’s opinion, in the near future Zyuganov will most likely be replaced on TV by Sergei Glazyev, whose ratings will rise to the level necessary to enter the State Duma. At the same time, Kara-Murza is convinced that Glazyev and Rogozin are more likely to take votes away from the pro-presidential United Russia and, partially, from the People’s Party [formed on the basis of the People’s Deputy Group last year] rather than the Communists.
Indeed, Sergei Glazyev’s appearances on TV have become more frequent of late, especially on the state-controlled First Channel. And this is hardly a coincidence. In charge of the Glazyev bloc’s media strategy is the deputy director general of the First Channel and well-known gallery owner Marat Gelman.
In the opinion of Alexei Kara-Murza, the setting up of such a coalition is being orchestrated by various forces in the presidential administration, which ''playing against each other may lead to an unexpected result'' – Glazyev will take voters from part of United Russia’s electorate, and also from Yabloko, which will criticize the social policies of the president and the government in its campaign.
Another influential political consultant, chairman of the Effective Politics Foundation and the key strategist for United Russia, Gleb Pavlovsky, partially disagrees with Kara-Murza. He links Glazyev’s prospects directly with the defeat of the Communist Party at the forthcoming elections. ''The Communists face many problems. It has been a long time since the party experienced a ‘general overhaul’ in the face of the [influx of] new cadres and is forced to enter the race in an emaciated state. That is why new groups being pulled into the CPRF become unruly for the old leadership.
''In these circumstances the Glazyev coalition is an incubator for creating a single force. It has every chance of evolving into a strong alloy of leaders with Sergei Glazyev and Dmitry Rogozin. Their chances of overcoming the 5 per cent voting barrier are high given the problems of the Communist Party, the leader of which, Gennady Zyuganov, has long since lost the qualities of an indisputable leader,'' holds Pavlovsky.
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