Date
Author
Кирилл РОДИОНОВ; Сотрудник Института Экономической Политики Имени Е Т Гайдара
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
Cure for stagnation
There are liberal challenges before any Russian president
At the end of November, a week before the annual message to the Federal Assembly , Dmitry Medvedev in his video blog made another appeal to citizens. The most memorable element of the president’s ten -minute speech was his phrase on the threat of a new “stagnation”, which is distrustive primarily for the party in power. Mr. Medvedev announced the need to ensure a high level of political competition, improving the quality of the national representation and protecting the rights of a minority.The president’s liberal statements are not at all a curiosity. It is enough to recall his performance at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum in February 2008 (it was there that the phrase "Freedom is better than not freebod"), the article "Russia, go ahead!" (with the promise: “The political system of Russia will be extremely open, flexible and internally complex”), last year’s appeal to the Federal Assembly (“as a guarantor of the Constitution I will continue to do everything possible to strengthen the institutions of democracy in our country”).
The problem is that the matter did not actually go further than the declarations. The wishes of the president, in which many political scientists saw the signals of the upcoming socio-political liberalization, in reality turned into the twisting of the nuts. Let us recall the increase in the term of office of the President and the State Duma (up to six and five years, respectively) and the new law on the police, which significantly expands the powers of law enforcement agencies.
In this context, Dmitry Medvedev’s statements, made by him in an earlier, pre -presidential period, can be mentioned. In November 2003, immediately after his appointment to the post of head of the Presidential Administration, in an interview with the state television company RTR, he set out his own point of view on the Yukos business. Then he actually reproached the Prosecutor General in the "impermanality" of her actions: "The consequences of not completely thought -out actions will immediately affect the economy, cause embarrassment in political life." As an example, he gave the arrest of 44% of the shares of Yukos by the Prosecutor General: “These shares belong to offshore, and they are provided with requirements for compensation for damage. The legal effectiveness of this kind of interim measures is not obvious. ” After the 2008 presidential election, many experts expected that the second criminal case against the ex-head of the Yukos and the former head of the MFR MELETEP would be closed. But this was not done.
If you look for two and a half years of the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev with your eyes, the question reasonably arises: why does he need liberal declarations if, in general, he continues the course of Vladimir Putin? One of the possible answers is that, upon coming to the Kremlin, the president needed to position himself somewhat perfectly from the line of behavior of the prime minister. If Vladimir Putin is based mainly on pensioners, rural residents and low -skilled workers, then Dmitry Medvedev addresses the most educated and wealthy part of the company. Such a “division of labor” within the ruling tandem is quite logical in the conditions of a closed political system. When the parliament is not a place for discussions, and citizens do not identify themselves with a particular party, the president and prime minister play the roles of the “left” and “right” politician, thereby provoking analysts to assumptions about the “schism in Duumvirate”.
This factor is important in the context of the "problem of 2012." Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that there would be no competition in the upcoming presidential elections between him and Medvedev: only one of the members of the tandem would participate in the presidential race. The choice of a person who eventually goes to the elections will depend not only on the candidate’s hardware weight, but also on what agenda he can offer to society. And here the position of Medvedev is more advantageous. If in 2000 the demand for stability, strengthening the state and the “equidistance” of the oligarchs was great in society, now the ideas of structural reforms in the economy, the removal of bureaucratic pressure on business and establishing relations with the West are more in demand. It is clear that in this situation the position of a politician with the previous agenda (the personification of which is Putin) will not be so convincing.
In any case, any politician who will become the president after 2012 will be forced to respond to the challenges that Russia will encounter in the coming years - the crisis of the pension system, a strong dependence of the budget on oil prices, the inefficiency of state corporations, the corruption of the bureaucratic apparatus. These and many other problems require deep transformations comparable to the reforms of the early 1990s.
Obviously, Vladimir Putin has already used his reformal potential in the early 2000s, when tax reform was carried out, the reform of fiscal federalism and the Land Code was adopted. After 2003, the head of state focused on strengthening the vertical of power, building a model of hospitalism and occupying a tough position in relation to developed countries.
It must be admitted that Dmitry Medvedev has no special reform merits. For the entire period of his presidency, not a single serious structural reform was carried out. However, he has one big plus: if Putin focuses on maintaining the status quo, then Medvedev constantly denotes certain problems of Russian reality. And this is already not bad: as you know, the correct diagnosis is the first step towards recovery.
Of course, Dmitry Medvedev needs a close -knit team of professionals, a comprehensive transformation program and political will necessary for its implementation. According to the current constitution, he is the head of state and determines the main directions of domestic and foreign policy. The reform program is also available: it is necessary to get from the archive at least the government program of 2000 ("Gref program"), which in the previous decade was far from fully fulfilled, and slightly update it. As for the political will, Dmitry Medvedev, in the warehouse of his character, does not seem to have the qualities of Boris Yeltsin, who in the fall of 1991, knowing about empty warehouses and possible hungry riots, was not afraid to call a group of young economists to the government, whose views he did not always understand. However, if Medvedev has presidential ambitions, this gap will need to be replenished.
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