In the Kremlin

The results of the week. Competition in tandem?

June 3, 2011 Alexander Golts

I don’t know how you, but I strongly disagree with outstanding figures of domestic culture, who are preoccupied with the lack of political competition in the God -saved country. I really want to ask: "Gentlemen, have you turned on the TV for a long time?" After all, anyone who, by the family of classes (alas, I also relate to these unfortunate) is doomed to watch news programs through federal channels, may make sure that a full -fledged election campaign has begun in the country. Putin and Medvedev, as started, meet with doctors, teachers, students, schoolchildren, road builders and metallurgists. Each of them, as it were, decides state affairs, while campaigning exclusively for himself a beloved and almost directly competing with a tandem partner.

Here Medvedev demands to increase fifty percent salaries to medical workers of schools, nurseries and kindergartens. The next day, Putin promises to increase the salary of teachers by thirty percent from the first of September on September 1. Medvedev instructs to prepare proposals that the military registration and enlistment offices are not rowing into the army of school graduates who are 18 years old, right from the graduation evening, but would allow universities. Putin in response guarantees that, contrary to the plans of the reform of education, all subjects of the school curriculum will remain free. True, Medvedev left unanswered initiative about the radical improvement of roads. Apparently the president, even in his vast optimism, realizes that he could not solve the problem with fools.

It should be noted that the struggle is serious, gambling. Participants simply do not remember themselves. Trying to surpass each other, they promise, promise, promise. According to experts, the fulfillment of these promises will inevitably lead to the fact that the budget deficit will grow to 7-8%. But before the parliamentary elections for another six months, to the presidential, and even more. The price of oil even at one hundred dollars per barrel now simply does not correspond to the ambitions of the duumvirams. And it’s just scary to think that they promise in the near future.

Be that as it may, there is a fact that Russia not only caught up with civilized states in the field of development of democracy, but also overtook them all to the damn mother. There, in the West, they still cannot find the answer to the question of how to ensure equal conditions in the election struggle in a situation where one of the participants is in power. After all, whatever one may say, he has more opportunities for agitation. We seem to have both in power. At least both occupy the entire news space, seemingly fulfilling their official duties.

The mystery remains, why, in fact, is all this to them? Maybe this is a cover operation? Putin and Medvedev have already agreed on everything and now they deliberately lie a fool so that he who does not become the president would not be in the remaining months in the humiliating role of the “lame duck”. Then all the election exercises are a classic cover operation. Like that when two or three identical cars leave the embassy gate, which immediately confuses external observation. But is the price of such games too high in this case?

More likely another. The historical conversation between the Duumvirs has not yet taken place. Medvedev retains the hope that the main (and only) voter of the country will allow him to warm his chair for another six years. And with all its might depicts the ability to simulate independent political activity.

But at the same time, the main riddle is in another. Both Putin and Medvedev clearly appeal to voters, to the people, try to enlist his support. However, they created a system for ten years in which the authorities did not need this very popular support at all. A system in which universal political apathy is a guarantee that some call stability and others - stagnation.

And today the tandem itself begins to drive a wave in this stinking swamp. It seems to be for no apparent reason: with the existing system of Churov, the figures that are ordered. Why, one wonders, create the All -Russian Popular Front, threatening to take already paid places in the Duma of United Russia. Why galvanize with the help of Prokhorov a corpse called the “right business”? With greater or lesser confidence, one can state that the authorities needed legitimation. It was not necessary for the elections. In order to happen after them ...

Photos of RIA Novosti