The Kremlin begins casting parties for the 2007 parliamentary campaign. Special correspondent of the Kommersant Publishing House Mikhail Fishman believes that almost the central intrigue will be the determination of the fourth participant in the Duma race.
United Russia is doing well: it can no longer be replaced or dismembered. Recent events confirm this. After all, what is, for example, the introduction of youth quotas on party lists? Career elevator. They tell Komsomol members: if you want to go up, squeeze out the old people, work, here it is, the door. And a tool for party mobilization. Young people in the regions have their own funding channels, and they compete with elders almost like parties.
United Russia is divided not into flanks or factions—this project was quickly abandoned—but by age and into subgroups in the Duma. The Kremlin is strengthening the party, but only in the sense that United Russia is not a power body, but a skeleton, an apparatus for promoting the vertical. And it is in this capacity that it should have a controlling stake in the future Duma. Simply put, United Russia is obliged to take more than the rest of the parties that entered parliament combined.
This is apparently not a problem. At the end of March, United Russia's rating, according to Levada Center, was 47%, and the average figure for the March regional elections was about 40%. The law requires that at least two parties and at least 60% of the votes cast be represented in the future Duma. The favorites - United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Liberal Democratic Party - will solve this problem together. But the need for an anti-communist constitutional majority is forcing the Kremlin to introduce a fourth player into the Duma. And in general, the presence of a fourth faction adds legitimacy to the entire structure. United Russia, Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Liberal Democratic Party of Russia plus someone else. Who?
There is still time - about a year, and there is plenty to choose from. The Kremlin is casting among the second-tier parties that achieved success in the March elections. These are the Party of Pensioners (RPP), Semigin's "Patriots of Russia", the Party of Life and still "Motherland". “We need an alternative left project,” they say in the Kremlin. They think. Paradoxically, despite total control and complete technical, so to speak, equipment (we will do the entire design and select the faces, involve the governors, give the airwaves, a platform and the green light in the Ministry of Justice), the introduction of another participant to the Duma is a political problem.
The concept of a left alternative was born in the last Duma, and its meaning was to legalize orthodox rhetoric, to make it decent. But the paternalistic nationalist platform pulled out from under the Communist Party of the Russian Federation turned out to be so successful that Rogozin-Glazyev’s “Motherland”, created from scratch, had to turn off the air almost at the height of the 2003 campaign, and then both were thrown out of the party leadership. Its leader, Hartung, was also thrown out of the RPP, and both Hartung and Rogozin stumbled on the monetization of benefits. And they lost trust as their political capital grew.
Now Rodina and the RPP are quite loyal, and participation in politics for them is a purely business thing. If necessary, the leaders of both will give way to more famous figures. There are rumors that the head of Russian Railways Yakunin and Deputy Prosecutor General Kolesnikov may be seconded to the left flank. Rodina has already rejected xenophobia, this is no longer accepted, it has submitted an application to the Socialist International and proposes to divide the stabilization fund. But they don’t really trust her, and the positions of the RPP are preferable today, although its disloyal regional branches are still subject to repression.
But it's not a matter of trust. The problem is broader: the Kremlin is convinced that the “alternative left project” is akin to controlled nuclear fusion - either a hydrogen bomb or it doesn’t burn. This is the primitive public debate we have: either people feel needed and vote for the status quo, or they are disappointed and protest. An effective alternative to the slogans of stability and order is radical populism: either you are there, or you will not be heard.
But populism, as it turns out, is dangerous. This is a systemic risk. So you were put on the pre-election broadcast: how do you conduct a debate with the party in power? The political moment requires that what you say is obviously irrelevant. So that the question of whether you are for or against would not arise in principle. So that it is not left and not an alternative at all, but something on the side. The fourth player has a single role: to simply be a loyal faction of deputies in the Duma.
In this sense, the activity of the esoteric Party of Life with its ridiculous name and image of Deniskin’s semolina porridge is obviously not accidental. “We are in demand for political consultations,” Mironov’s supporters say. Indeed, the Workers’ Self-Government Party has already joined the PJ, Yabloko activists are thinking about joining its ranks, and recently Deputy Head of Administration Vladislav Surkov held a meeting with party activists and praised them for their balanced position. But there is another difficulty with the pancreas: it is not so easy to manage. Its leadership has direct access to the president. Dmitry Medvedev, when he was head of the administration, more than once had to change the position of the Senate through the president - the administration did not have enough arguments. Hartung, when he was expelled from the RPP, called on his supporters to join the PJ - because, he explains today, it is not controlled by the curator of internal politics, Mr. Surkov.
Probably, we should not overestimate the capabilities of Sergei Mironov. The fact, however, is that the problems of the upcoming Duma campaign, despite the clarity of its general line, have not been resolved and risk complicating the life of Kremlin strategists on the eve of the presidential elections.

Magazine "Kommersant Vlast" No. 15 of 04/17/2006, p. 38

The Kremlin is looking for a fourth