Return at the gate

The elections are definitely returning, but to say that they returned for real, so far early. The latest elections are rather a pen test. They will not radically change the picture on the country's scale, but the model for imitation - "Moscow -Yekaterinburg" - will give. A little decent than last year’s pilot, the governor’s elections also look, where, however, the current chapters always win by a wide margin. Actually, it is more correct to say that the meaning began to return to the elections, they became more interesting to both political elites in the regions and citizens.

There are plenty of crook on the part of the authorities, and at all levels. This is the appointment of voting on the second Sunday of September to avoid a normal campaign; and a thorough selection of candidates convenient for the authorities with the culling of a little dangerous; and criminal cases and threats of security forces at the address of many strong opposition candidates - Alexei Navalny, Evgeny Urlashov, Evgeny Roizman; and non -register/lifting of individual candidates and entire lists under various pretexts; And the draw, as a result of which United Russia almost everywhere occupies the first or second place in the ballot (when an average of 17-18 parties participate in the election in the Legislative Assembly, this is a considerable advantage). I'm not talking about tricks on the day of voting. In the best case, the authorities are trying to relatively honestly win the originally dishonest elections, where it sets the most convenient rules for the game and itself monitors their implementation. In most places, the elections are now dirty, as usual.

Analyzing the elections, they often emphasize the positive, attributed to a new, more competitive model, advanced responsible for domestic policy in the Kremlin Vyacheslav Volodin. Here is the appointment of a couple of acting Governors from among non-uniforms-from the LDPR in Smolensk and "Just Russia" in Chita; and registration of Navalny and Roizman as candidates in elections in Moscow and Yekaterinburg; and some restrictions on the efforts of security forces on discrediting and removing the candidates objectionable local authorities.

I would like to discuss this new one, which was revealed in the September 8 elections, to discuss the Kremlin model in more detail, and primarily in terms of prospects for its application. The most important question is what happens to the party system? With the efforts of power, she is even more degrading. Having given on the new lightweight registering rules to bloom one hundred colors, primarily the Kremlin selection, the Kremlin deliberately erodes the concept of a party in power. This is no longer a "United Russia" - the notorious "party of crooks and thieves", which the Kremlin does not intend to improv the image of which the Kremlin. This is not the "All -Russian Popular Front", now the "Popular Front for Russia", which does not evolve towards the party, but is called to be an inflatable toy taking such a form and color that the voter likes today. This, finally, is not Prokhorovskaya “Civil Platform”, which many in the regions accepted in the regions for the new promising younger partner of the Party of power. It was the "civilian platform" who experienced perhaps the maximum administrative pressure in these elections. She was "soaked" in Yaroslavl, Vladimir, Transbaikalia ... - Wherever she became a platform for counter -allet.

It seems that with the silent consent of the elderly party leaders of the Parties of the Duma opposition, who are ready to play along with the Kremlin in order to maintain their privileged position, the Kremlin actually created a wide and amorphous left-forensic protoparty coalition, which allows him to directly contact the voter through the heads of the political elite.

Regional parties have long been prohibited from us, although when they were, for the most part they were stronger than those few dozen spoilers and opera structures that appeared at the federal level as a result of a recent “political reform”. The current regional structures of the federal parties are clean franchises, when, say, a local businessman pays off a well -known party brand and goes to the polls with him. And when, analyzing the results of the current campaign, they say that the Patriots of Russia performed well in the elections to the city assembly of Krasnoyarsk , it must be understood that this is a long -known former aluminum magnate Anatoly Bykov and its people.

Look at the Moscow elections, where formally five out of six candidates represented parties, and three of them were federal party leaders. The real struggle unfolded between the two persons without a distinctly declared party affiliation-the current mayor Sergei Sobyanin, a self-nominated, and the general supporting Alexei Navalny, registered from the distant RPR-Parnas. The rest of the candidates who played the role of the statists did not particularly advertise their belonging to the parties that put forward them.

So, our elections are gradually returning, starting from the largest and most advanced post -industrial cities. What we are observing now is so far the appearance of small cracks in the wall of electoral authoritarianism, and by no means the destruction of this wall. And the electoral authoritarianism is doing everything now so that, after the wall collapses, nothing remains, providing suppatorite political development, only scorched land.