Borya Two percent

The results of the election of the governor of the Irkutsk region partially refute the generally correct idea that elections are not an Olympic sport. Here, as a rule, the main thing is not participation, but victory. However, the defeat of the secretary of the Irkutsk regional committee, Sergei Levchenko, who lagged behind the incumbent governor by 2 percentage points, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation can safely record in its asset. It's not even that, according to political technologists, "direct use of administrative resources", but simply put, ballot stuffing usually brings the incumbent governor from 2 to 5% of the total number of votes. And although Mr. Levchenko has already announced that he will protest the results of the vote, he, in his own words, feels fine without it. Moreover, most likely his protests will not change the results of the vote in any way - there was no precedent in Russia for canceling the results of the second round of elections due to such trifles as ballot stuffing, and even more so illegal campaigning.

Here are the numbers. In the first round, Boris Govorin won 45% of the vote, in the second - 47%. Sergei Levchenko: 24% in the first round, 45% in the second. Mr. Govorin added only 2 percent to the results of the first round - and outstripped his rival by exactly the same amount. Some journalist from Irkutsk has already joked that Govorina, after Kasyanov, should wear the nickname "Two Percent". "Borya Two Percent" - funny. Joking aside, the victory of the communists lies primarily in the fact that they managed to gather under their red flag all the voters who voted against the incumbent governor in the first round.

And first of all, this shows that the voter does not see much difference between the communists and the current government. A couple of years ago in the provinces there was a large stratum of people who never, under any circumstances, voted for the Communists. As the voting results in Irkutsk and Nizhny Novgorod show, if such people remain, then there are very few of them. The majority, largely due to the actions of the current government, are no longer afraid of the Communists. And this is not surprising. When the President of Russia repeatedly calls for cooperation with the Reds and calls the Communist Party of the Russian Federation “the only party that really exists in the country”, it is somehow stupid to scare the voters who heard this message with a red threat.

Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs are even less afraid of the Reds. The current regime of "patriotic statesmen" has "ordered" life in such a way that the danger of a new communist order is somehow not perceived by business. Against this background, strange, incredible unions of Chubais and Zyuganov (Irkutsk), Nemtsov and Khodyrev (Nizhny) arise a couple of years ago. It seems that the situation in the Rostov region, where elections will be held in October, will be close to the Irkutsk-Nizhny Novgorod situation. The incumbent governor Vladimir Chub will be opposed by the communist Ivanchenko, who is ready to be supported in his claims by Alfa Group and the aluminum industry. It's funny that in Irkutsk, the aluminum barons were on the side of Boris Govorin, who gave them power over Irkutskenergo, and in Rostov they are likely to be on the side of the communist, since Mr. Chub has no desire to give something like that to Deripaska and Abramovich. However, there is nothing surprising in this - left-right entrepreneurs have no ideological preferences, elections for them are "only business, nothing personal." And the pre-election business with the communists is very beneficial for our businessmen for the time being. After all, in addition to the votes that any candidate could get with the money of the industrialists, the communist candidate has 20-25% of the votes of the communist electorate, which means that his victory will cost less. That's just playing in such a business, one day you can wake up in the country of victorious socialism.

Pseudo-communist revival - Grani.Ru, 08/20/2001

In the depths of Siberian ores - Grani.Ru, 07/30/2001

Regional chess: Voloshin vs. Surkov - Grani.Ru, 20.07.2001