Harmful illusions. Ivan Belyaev - About the Sting of Governor's Elections

Not six years ago, on October 14, 2012, the first governor elections were held in Russia after their restoration. They took place in five regions; In the Bryansk region, the current governor Nikolai Denin won. The second place was taken by the Communist Vadim Potomsky, who was just a year and a half after that Vladimir Putin appointed the acting governor of the Oryol region.

Then Pisassky triumphantly won the election in the Oryol region, showing the result higher than once at the speaker of the Federation Council Yegor Stroev. He stayed with the governor for three years, was noted by a loud scandalous story with a monument to Ivan the Terrible, and last fall he switched to a calm grain position in the apparatus of the president’s plenipotentiary in the Central Federal District. A few days before the victory of Patvsky, Putin removed from the power of Nikolai Denin in connection with the loss of trust. Then a criminal case, and from 2015 to this spring a popularly elected governor was in prison.

One day with Poznutskoy, the governor’s elections in the Komi Republic with a brilliant result by almost 80% were won by Vyacheslav Gaiser. A year later, he was shifted from his post in connection with the loss of confidence, he also fell under trial and, unlike Denin, still sits.

These stories can be strung to one another endlessly. The governor’s elections formally returned, but Russia did not become a truly federal state from this. Russia is a presidential dictatorship, and all the discussions about which regions have failed this September United Russia, end on the simple fact that any governor from the LDPR or the Communist Party can be resigned by the pen of the pen until tomorrow's lunch, and to prison - before dinner.

The regime not only resisted - he didn't even sway

I will not argue with the fact that these several failures were a rather amusing sight. In the absence of a real opposition (there were no real critics of power in any region, for example, Evgeny Roizman or Lev Schlosberg), competing with independent rivalrs (the notorious municipal filter), who themselves tried to lose, but, like a nag from a joke, “did not shut,” several Putin governors suffered shameful and shameful and shame crushing lesions.

The only trouble is that the ruling regime easily flows these gaps. For governors from the System Opposition, the Word Systems will turn out to be much more important than the word “opposition”, and in some regions they are powered by any firefighter: deputies of the Legislative Assembly of the Vladimir Region have already banned the elected governor Vladimir Sipyagin without agreement with them.

Until next year, painful topics like pension reform will subside, the presidential administration will draw the necessary conclusions, and the Governor's elections in 2019 will be a series of reprisals of the United Russia over their puppet rivals. Actually, in September, there were a lot of these reprisals, including even in Moscow, just these executions were slightly faded into the background of the events in the problematic regions. The loss of Vyacheslav Shport or Svetlana Orlova is a painful blow to their careers, but nothing more. It would be naive and even harmful to associate with these defeats some political illusions. The ruling regime not only resisted - despite all the media noise, he did not even sway.

Ivan Belyaev - Journalist Radio Liberty

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