By Renfrey Clarke MOSCOW — On November 10 aides came away from the bedside of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, hospitalised a fortnight earlier following a heart attack, bearing an order vetoing a recently adopted law which set out the basis for forming the next Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's parliament. In most other countries, this would have been sensational news. The legal basis for the functioning of the upper house is now utterly obscure. There is little prospect of the tangle being unravelled soon, and when parliament meets next year following lower house elections on December 17, the Federation Council will almost certainly still be in a juridical limbo. Here the news of the veto passed almost without comment. So, there's a bitter political impasse, pitting the president against the parliament? What else is new. The legitimacy of major elements of the system of rule is a moot point. Russia is a country where political specialists admit quietly that the constitution itself was almost certainly not legitimately adopted. To be fair, Russians have had a great deal lately to sate their appetites for political burlesque. Since mid-October the following events have featured in the run-up to the polls for the lower house, the State Duma:
- The Central Electoral Commission (CEC) published a "black list" of election candidates with criminal convictions against their names — only to meet with outraged protests when the list proved to be full of errors and inconsistencies;
- A string of political blocs and parties, including Russia's front-running liberal capitalist formation, were refused official registration for their lists of election candidates;
- Liberal groups have campaigned to force the Constitutional Court to overturn the 5% barrier that electoral formations must surmount if they are to win proportional representation in the Duma;
- Close to a quarter of the current Duma deputies have lined up behind a court suit aimed at overturning the electoral law as a whole; and
- State funds have very likely been used to finance a series of concerts aimed at inducing young people to vote for the pro- government electoral bloc.
With a law on parliamentary immunity shielding deputies from prosecution, winning a place in the Duma has been an attractive proposition for Russian criminals. During October, the press revealed that the CEC had asked the Interior Ministry to investigate the backgrounds of candidates. The commission soon released a list of the "criminals" who had been identified. Alongside the authentic felons were various candidates who were quite innocent; the authorities had apparently confused them with people bearing similar names. Other candidates on the list had been convicted under Soviet-era laws that have now been repealed; these "criminals" included a number of well-known former dissidents.
Disqualified
The CEC was again in the headlines when at least six electoral groups — including the much-fancied "Yabloko" bloc of liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky — were banned from presenting candidates for the half of the Duma seats to be filled by Russia-wide proportional representation. The groups Democratic Russia and the Federal Democratic Movement were disqualified after submitting their lists of petition signatures only 10 minutes before the October 22 deadline. Electoral officials argued that because they could not stamp each page of these groups' signature lists before the allotted time expired, the lists had come too late to qualify. More explosive in its impact was the disqualification of Yabloko and of the populist-nationalist bloc Derzhava ("Great Power"), headed by Yeltsin's estranged former vice-president Alexander Rutskoi. The electoral law bans parties and blocs from removing people from the lists of candidates once these lists are submitted and petitioning gets under way. Candidates who decide for themselves to quit the race must submit notice of this in writing. Of Derzhava's 270 candidates, 86 decided that the glare of the political spotlight was not for them. Many failed to notify their withdrawal. The CEC decided that the mass exodus changed the Derzhava ticket so radically that the bloc's petition signatures could not be considered valid. Yabloko was disqualified on October 29 on the grounds that six of its candidates who had decided not to run had failed to give notice of their wish to bow out. While the establishment media showed little sympathy for Derzhava and Rutskoi — still anathema to Russian liberals — Yabloko was in a quite different category. Angry editorials forced the commission and its chairperson Nikolai Ryabov onto the defensive. Yabloko, it can fairly be said, set itself up for disqualification, ignoring repeated warnings from the CEC to put its documents in order. Once the blow had fallen, leaders of the bloc set out to profit from their new status as martyrs, painting themselves as victims of a "conspiracy". No less calculating than Yabloko, the electoral commission had a definite agenda in punishing sloppy paperwork by refusing registration rather than imposing fines, as it was also empowered to do. The commissioners were open about their wish to limit the number of organisations — eventually, no fewer than 42 — that won a place on the ballot. More disturbingly, the CEC also sought to please its masters in the Kremlin; the pro-government bloc "Our Home is Russia" was registered without demur despite sins far more grievous than those of Yabloko. According to the English-language
Moscow Tribune, "Our Home is Russia" went onto the ballot "despite the fact that 40 of its 261 candidates had been withdrawn from party lists, and the party was found to have included more than 1800 forged signatures on its petitions." The discrimination against Yabloko was almost certainly linked to the fact that Yabloko leader Yavlinsky promises to be one of Yeltsin's strongest rivals in the presidential elections due for next year. The blocs and parties that have felt themselves wronged by the electoral commission have generally gone to court, and in most cases have emerged victorious. All the groups initially denied registration have since won a place on the ballot. Faith in the competence and fairness of the CEC has dropped accordingly.
Electoral hurdle
The groups contesting the elections now face the test of attracting enough votes to make the 5% cut-off point. Most analysts believe that no more than six parties and blocs will clear this hurdle. The organisations that miss out will come largely from the unpopular, chronically divided liberal-capitalist right. Facing an electoral wipe-out, Russia's "democrats" have called for the "5%" barrier to be declared unconstitutional, arguing that the provision threatens to deny as many as 60% of voters the right to representation by parties of their choice. Opponents of these moves have replied that factionalism should not be rewarded, and that the effects of changing the legislation at this stage would be intolerable. Even the abolition of the "5%" hurdle would not be enough for 102 deputies of the current Duma. Largely people who have little chance of getting back into parliament under the current provisions, these deputies have called on the Constitutional Court to invalidate the electoral law as a whole, claiming that the law violates the constitution on at least four grounds. Drafting and adopting a new electoral law would take months, and would keep the deputies in their jobs until well into next year. Amid ploys as devious as these, plain old misappropriation of public funds comes almost as a relief. On November 13 American rapper MC Hammer featured in the first of a program of concerts organised by the Our Home is Russia Cultural Initiative. On every seat in the auditorium was a copy of the Our Home political platform. Spokespeople for Our Home insisted that the bill for the concerts was being met by the electoral bloc. But when contacted by journalists, the US-based promoter entrusted with hiring the foreign artists was emphatic that the money to pay the stars had come from the Russian government, and that no political group was involved. On December 17, ingrained habit and the chance to give the authorities "one in the eye" will probably ensure a reasonable turnout of voters. But there is little sense in Russian society that the parliamentary elections are likely to change anything. To some degree, this is because the parliament is understood to have barely token powers. But it is also true that the actions of the Central Electoral Commission and of self-interested liberal factions have fed a mood of popular cynicism, reinforcing the belief of millions of Russians that politics is inherently a dirty business, and parliament its grubbiest component. In the process, the modest possibilities which the Duma and the elections have for reinforcing democratic practices and attitudes in Russia are being lost. Russians once again are being encouraged to seek a "strong tsar", wily and ruthless enough to "put the country in order". The prime beneficiary of this trend will be Yeltsin, or whichever booming-voiced claimant to the post of elective dictator manages to succeed him.