| The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Rodina will protest together The Rodina factions and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation will formalize their relations in the State Duma any day now. The alliance will take the form of a coordinating council for joint parliamentary work. The initiative to create the council was made by the leader of the Rodina faction, Dmitry Rogozin. In the expert community, an opinion immediately appeared about the “hand of the Kremlin” guiding the leader of Rodina.
The parties claim that they were prompted to cooperate by their common positions on the law on the monetization of benefits adopted yesterday, as well as on a number of other unpopular legislative initiatives that the government is preparing. Both communists and Rodintsy diligently make reservations: they say that they have no ideological closeness, but life forces them to consolidate - in the conditions of the unprecedented power of “United Russia”.
As Dmitry Rogozin told a Vremya Novostei correspondent, Rodina has already prepared a draft regulation for the future council and sent it to the head of the Communist Party faction, Gennady Zyuganov. “There is the experience of the coordination council of centrist factions in the last Duma, which we will take as a basis,” Rogozin said. - We will conduct preliminary examinations of bills. After all, the government is conducting its zero reading, and we will conduct ours. We have already tested the practice of joint examination on the law on the monetization of benefits, which our faction divided in half with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. As a result, we took an active part in preparing the amendments. At the same time, we will coordinate tactics in the State Duma. For example, we will decide together when to vote, when not to vote, and when it might be worth leaving the hall.”
At the same time, even despite the alliance with the communists, the leader of Rodina is skeptical about the capabilities of the Duma opposition in this convocation. He emphasized that from September the Rodina party will carry out most of its work on the streets, organizing protests. And for this it is necessary to strengthen the Rodina youth organization. “The party needs a little Hamas,” Rogozin joked.
At the same time, the Rodina leader did not deny the possibility of cooperation with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation going beyond the framework of parliamentary work. However, he emphasized that it is too early to talk about this: “It is possible that in the future this council will become a field for the emergence of an organization within which Rodina and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation will jointly engage in not only parliamentary work. But this does not mean our ideological rapprochement with the communists. We have different roots."
The communists also do not rule out a turn of events in which they and their Rodins will hold joint protests in the streets. “Before talking about the coordination council, the parties need to outline the field of activity. Will it be limited directly to legislative work, or will it go beyond its scope? We are talking about protests and some other events,” Sergei Reshulsky, coordinator of the Communist Party faction in the State Duma, told reporters.
“I think that Rogozin’s initiative was sanctioned by the Kremlin, and not an initiative at all,” Boris Makarenko, first deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. - Rogozin, like the leader of any alternative left project, needs to show the voter that he is real. Real means conditionally oppositional and different from “United Russia”. The communist reaction is very cautious. They say that the coalition is situational, not principled. They, too, in this situation, when the party has just been subjected to such an attack by Zyuganov’s opponents, have to demonstrate constructiveness. In addition, they are interested in the two opposition forces in the Duma coordinating their efforts in order to somehow resist the dominance of United Russia. So this is a marriage of convenience and it won’t last.”
The creation of the coordination council of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Rodina strangely coincided with the recognition by the Ministry of Justice of the legitimacy of the Zyuganov part of the Communist Party (this legal dispute began after the internal party opposition held its congress with an alternative leader - the governor of the Ivanovo region, Vladimir Tikhonov). This coincidence gave rise to rumors that Zyuganov received legitimacy from the authorities in exchange for friendship with Rogozin. However, it is unlikely that the authorities would act so crudely. Most likely, the leader of the Communist Party was simply placed in conditions under which he needed to prove the constructiveness of his work. Ksenia VERETENNIKOVA |
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