Pouted rude

The elections held on Sunday should have an answer to a number of questions important for the political regime, and above all, to the question of whether it is possible to live on without serious changes in the electoral and wider, political system - without large -scale political modernization. The Duma elections that have passed less than a year ago and the political protests that began after them demonstrated a crisis of confidence in power by society. The legitimacy of the authorities began to fall, undermining the already struty opportunities to act decisively in a situation of sluggish economic crisis and stagnation. Neither the Duma nor the presidential elections, it would seem, won by the Kremlin, could strengthen the legitimacy of power. It seems that they will not be able to do this and just ended elections in the regions.

The fact is that on the acute political issues standing in front of her, instead of strengthening the elements of real and at the same time public policy, began to meet political technological methods. As in the March elections in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the authorities began to play fundamentally differently than in December 2011, using the administrative resource as much as possible, but if possible avoiding direct falsifications. The game was used to reduce the turnout, the widespread use of senior parties, registration of scomorrh candidates and substitution candidates ready to withdraw from the elections at the right time. At the same time, traditional methods were widely developed - the mobilization of state employees and all kinds of tricks with voting at home and in absenteeisms.

As a result of all these tricks, the Kremlin managed to achieve the re -election of all five governors, including frankly weak and unpopular. The elections on October 14, which became a frank farce in the Ryazan and Bryansk regions, seemed to consider the Kremlin as a kind of vaccination so that the administrative system would illuminate direct elections in a lightweight form. It doesn’t matter whether this was the initial plan or it happened as a result of intra -elite showdowns, but the elections showed that under the new law of any current governor, you can re -elect without special violations. That is, the content of the elections can be emasculated by preserving only the form.

In addition, the relatively high result of the lists of United Russia was demonstrated in the elections to a dozen regional and capital city assemblies of deputies. To interpret all this as the victory of the authorities and almost revenge for defeat last December would be extremely naive. Firstly, victory is a blow, since some improvement in the relative indicators of EP has been achieved against the backdrop of a significant decrease in voting. Secondly, the price that the Kremlin paid for such a propaganda victory is too high. This price is not only discrediting, but also further degradation of the system.

The picture in the municipal elections was significantly different from the regional, since the voter at the local level makes decisions based not so much from the party coloring of candidates as from their specific business qualities. It is characteristic that many of the candidates supported by the authorities went to the elections as self -nominated, and not from EP, realizing that belonging to the "party in power" did not add popularity to them.

An example of the Sverdlovsk region is interesting - one of the most democratic, and therefore problematic regions for the Kremlin. The election of the mayor of Nizhny Tagil - Putings,, as it is now called, - won the candidate of ER Sergey Nosov with a result above 90 percent, but this result indicates primarily of his personal popularity and the rate of EP on a strong and popular politician. It is significant that in a nearby town of Degtyarsk, where EP supported the deputy mayor, she lost by a wide margin of candidate of Fair Russia. In general, the tactics of EP in the region consisted in supporting strong candidates, so it is not surprising that out of 17 mayor elections, her candidates lost in only three cases. As for the popularity of the EP, it is more likely to reflect the vote for party councils in the elections of deputy meetings in four municipal regions, none of which the party could not exceed 50 percent.

Blessed falsifications in the form of rewriting protocols in the elections were definitely less than before, largely due to the mass presence of observers. In the Moscow region alone there were three and a half thousand, including almost a thousand in Khimki.

Arranging such elections, the authorities themselves deprive itself of the only one that the elections were given to her - legitimacy. And then you can talk as much as you like about the "victories" in the elections to which citizens do not go due to the fact that they have no one to choose from. We can talk about the weaknesses of the opposition, not thinking that this weakness, and sometimes practically the absence of an opposition, is primarily a huge political risk to the system, which is impossible to preserve by changing the ruling party with an exacerbation of the crisis - the departure of the ruling party will mean the dismantling of the system as a whole.

That the elections really demonstrated is a deepening crisis, and not so much EP as the entire party system. Several real -registered parties recently drowned in the sea of ​​Kremlin crafts and fakes, "bite" part of the votes at the Communist Party and "Just Russia", whose opposition in many cases also raises questions. Three of the six, according to the results of the elections on October 14, regional parliaments will be bipartisan - from deputies from United Russia and from the Communist Party, in the manner of the Moscow City Duma.

Contrary to the statements of her leaders, EP does not look stronger now than before. At the same time, the three other Duma parties look weaker than before, largely due to the targeted efforts of the Kremlin. Of the 57 thousand, they managed to put up 11 thousand against 22 thousand from United Russia in total registered in all elections of candidates. From the parties of the next echelon, the "patriots of Russia" with seven hundreds of candidates came closest to the Duma four. In the last elections, they acted mainly in the role of spoilers, but it is possible that in the future the Kremlin can use them as a replacement for “Just Russia” as a reserve party in power.

Returning to the question formulated at the beginning of the article, say that after October 14 the answer to it is clear: large -scale political modernization is necessary and inevitable, but the current government is not able to realize this, much less, to conduct such modernization. She is too busy with the problem of holding the authorities today to think about tomorrow and prepare for it.