Translated material
Party palmistry
The election commission of the Sverdlovsk region did not understand the intricacies of federal political technology palmistry and did not read the bizarre party lines from the “hand of Moscow”. She took and deregistered the list of the Russian Party of Life from registration for elections to the regional parliament. Although the life of this glorious organization is now guaranteed by the supreme power itself, which has declared the unification of the seemingly stillborn party of Sergei Mironov with the half-strangled Rodina party as the newest and most promising political project. The new "correct" non-opposition left party should secure a constitutional majority in the new federal parliament in the 2007 elections. There will no longer be single-mandate seats there, there will be only party lists. And United Russia will not get 66% of the votes even with the help of administrative resources.
However, in the Sverdlovsk region the parliament will be elected on October 8, 2006, and the United Russia there does not want to share power with the Party of Life. As a result, a very significant conflict of administrative resources occurred.
All opposing sides - Governor Eduard Rossel, United Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church - unconditionally support President Putin. But now the Sverdlovsk regional branch of the Russian Orthodox Church is collecting signatures for an appeal to the president with a request to stop the administrative lawlessness of United Russia. After all, it was this party that the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and the speaker of the upper house of the federal parliament, Sergei Mironov, publicly accused of removing his party’s list from the Sverdlovsk elections. That is, one “Putin’s party” asks Putin to intercede in the fight against another “Putin’s party.” And the president himself, who both personally and ex officio hardly cares much about the fate and composition of the parliament of the Sverdlovsk region (no opposition will win the elections there anyway), turns out to be the only real judge in this conflict.
Eduard Rossel, who outlasted one Russian president as governor and has every chance of outlasting the second, is now forced to guess which of the two parties in power is more powerful. He has already joined United Russia, it is already in power, and the Kremlin is just creating a new left party. So the experienced apparatchik Rossel decided not to bet on the dark horse yet.
In an as yet unsent appeal to the president, the Sverdlovsk branch of the Party of Life unwittingly identified the key flaw in the escheat system of which it wants to become a part. Regional officials are accused of “privatizing” (as written in the text of the appeal) the right to act on behalf of Putin and the party in power. In other words, according to this logic, all party competition in the country should be reduced to the division of the right to use the president who is ending his reign (according to the current Constitution). “We are also the party of power,” shout the “Zhizny” people. We also have the right to speculate on the highest “bright name” for selfish political purposes. It is no less touching that the communists, from whom the new united left party should bite off part of the electorate, considered the collection of signatures for the appeal to be unethical PR for the Party of Life at Putin’s expense. And at the expense of whom else, one might ask, should the party, which claims to be the “second iron leg” of the Kremlin party prosthesis, promote itself? Due to the muskrat or what?
Thus, party palmistry gives rise to unexpected political competition in the country. This, of course, is not a full-fledged democracy when real political parties with real leaders compete for votes with their programs. This is “bureaucratic” democracy, a conflict of administrative resources of officials of different ranks built into the power vertical.
The speaker of the upper house of parliament turns out to be a political competitor of the speaker of the lower house of parliament, although both of them are extremely loyal to the supreme power. And the governor hopes to survive in this battle for power at the top, also, on occasion, using his administrative resources and no less loyalty to the main boss. In addition, the governor has a real large region under his command, while the two speakers have only the chambers of the Russian parliament.