Translated material
The system "its
Russians attribute all government successes to the president, and all failures to the Duma.
Although the Duma is elected by the population, it is clearly not one of the government bodies that enjoys their love and trust. And recently, the already low levels of Russians’ trust in the lower house of the federal parliament have noticeably worsened. As a survey by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion conducted in September showed, Russians most often assess the results of the work of the State Duma of the current convocation negatively (29%) or neutrally (37%). There were only 14% of respondents who believe that parliamentarians do not eat their bread in vain.According to VTsIOM, over the past year the share of negative assessments of the activities of the lower house of parliament has increased from 25 to 29%, while the share of neutral ones has decreased from 44 to 37%. As for individual personalities, the leader of the LDPR, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is in the lead among both the most beloved and least favorite deputies. Both lists also included the speaker, leader of United Russia Boris Gryzlov and the head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation faction Gennady Zyuganov.
Among the laws adopted by the Duma recently, the monetization of benefits, housing reform, and the transition to 100 percent payment for housing and communal services caused the greatest dissatisfaction among Russians. Despite the fact that all these laws could not be passed by parliament without the approval of the president, Vladimir Putin's trust rating - already impressive - has increased by another 2% since the beginning of the year and amounted to 54%. General Director of VTsIOM Valery Fedorov explained this situation to a Vremya Novostey correspondent: “We no longer blame the president for everything and are not grateful to him for everything, as usually happens in an absolute monarchy. We now have a different mechanism at work: the successes of the state as a whole are attributed, as a rule, to the figure whom people trust the most. In recent years, such a figure in our country has, of course, been President Putin. If there had been President Yeltsin, nothing would have been attributed to him. And shortcomings, problems, difficulties, on the contrary, are attributed to those figures in power who do not inspire confidence. These are certain ministers in the government - all the names are well known, or the State Duma as a body is the least understandable, the least popular and the least, from the point of view of Russians, effective. Russians have a basic definition of parliament as a “talking shop.” That is, a lot of words, little action. The population has very little understanding of the gigantic legislative work that the Duma is doing. Three quarters of Russians could not name a single good or bad law. People think that laws are laws, and life goes on some other rails and, accordingly, the institution that passes these laws is not very important, because it is engaged in some kind of abstract activity.”
Vice-Speaker of the State Duma, deputy head of the United Russia faction Vladimir Katrenko does not see any particular problem in the growth of negative assessments of the Duma’s activities: “Unanimous approval of the activities of any of the branches of government has long been a thing of the distant past. And the current discord in assessments of the work of the State Duma only confirms that the country is on a democratic path of development. This is the first thing. Secondly, if we sum up the positive and so-called “neutral” assessments of the State Duma’s activities, we get an obvious majority. These are Russian citizens who do not speak negatively about the work of their own parliament, which in itself is a positive result,” Mr. Katrenko told a Vremya Novostei correspondent.
Opposition representatives have a different opinion. “In principle, the Duma does not enjoy authority with me, despite the fact that I myself am a deputy,” Oleg Kulikov, a member of the Communist Party faction, shared with a Vremya Novostey correspondent. - The Duma is completely dependent, it passes laws that are needed not by the people, but by the bureaucracy or big business. The Duma is socially irresponsible. And if she has such a rating, then she deserves such treatment. I hope that the people will understand that not only and not so much the Duma is responsible for their standard of living. The press behaves more harshly with the Duma than with the executive branch, and shows its courage. But I think it’s deserved.”