| United Russia wants to provide the president's successor with its party card State Duma Speaker and United Russia leader Boris Gryzlov told reporters yesterday that the party will nominate its candidate for the 2008 presidential elections. He emphasized that “a party president is a generally accepted practice” and similar experience is used in most countries, including the G8 countries.
First, according to the speaker, United Russia sets itself the task of obtaining a parliamentary majority in the State Duma, and only then “the party will nominate its candidate for the post of President of Russia.” And just recently, Mr. Gryzlov said that United Russia would support the candidacy for the post of head of state proposed by current President Vladimir Putin. Such a statement raises a logical question: what will United Russia do if Putin announces as his successor a non-United Russia member, for example, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev or Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, whose candidacies are most widely discussed.
Nevertheless, the day before Gryzlov’s statement, Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration Vladislav Surkov, again in a conversation with journalists, did not rule out that in the future the head of state may have a specific party affiliation. And the first vice-speaker of the State Duma, deputy secretary of the presidium of the General Council of United Russia, Oleg Morozov, promised that the party would decide on a specific candidate for the post of head of state next fall. “The discussion of the candidacy for the post of head of state will take place in accordance with the law next fall. All conversations on this topic before the specified date are of a debatable nature,” Mr. Morozov noted, explaining that the corresponding decision will be made at the next congress or conference of the party. He also noted that the idea of the president's partisanship logically stems from changes in Russian legislation. It is not appropriate for the president to walk around without a party card after all those laws aimed at “partisanship of the political system” that the State Duma has recently adopted.
Deputy General Director of the Center for Political Technologies Alexei Makarkin is confident that the president and the party in power will not differ in their views on the candidacy of a successor: “United Russia” is an instrument of power in the party sphere. Therefore, even if they promote one of their candidates, and the president says that another person will be the successor, they will support him tomorrow,” Mr. Makarkin told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. This is exactly how the situation developed when Putin unexpectedly announced Mikhail Fradkov as a candidate for prime minister; United Russia supported him. This party will work as the president's political support. And those people who are now being discussed as possible successors are quite compatible with United Russia - both image-wise and organizationally. They will just get a party card.”
Member of the General Council of United Russia, Chairman of the Committee on Regulations and Organization of Work of the State Duma Oleg Kovalev, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostey correspondent, also doubted the possibility of the emergence of two successors - according to the party’s version and according to the president’s version: “I think that this will not happen . Firstly, we check all our actions with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and before making any serious political decision, of course, we definitely hold consultations with him at one level or another, so to speak, we synchronize our watches. In addition, the president will not formally nominate a candidate. He will simply name the one he supports. I think that he will first of all name a candidate to us - as a party that has walked alongside him all these years and done everything it could to implement the president’s ideas on issues of socio-economic development.” Ksenia VERETENNIKOVA |
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