Boris Kagarlitsky
Falling Ratings Reflect Failing Trust

With the curtain falling on summer and the political season at hand, the news and analysis web site Forum.msk.ru last week posted the curious results of an opinion poll. The poll revealed a catastrophic decline in the approval ratings of the political parties that are currently represented in the State Duma. Strangely enough, if we are to believe this poll, no party is gaining from the falling popularity of others. People appear to be losing confidence in all the Duma parties at once.

Naturally, information posted on a website should ideally be double-checked. This seems doubly important in this case as the unidentified authors of the Forum article reviewing the poll results did not make reference to any of Russia's respected pollsters. Instead, data were cited that had been gathered by "one of the Russian secret service organizations, which have become so numerous of late."

However, it makes sense to take the results seriously, if only because the trend that the anonymous and mysterious poll revealed is far from unique. In the majority of European countries, something very similar appears to be happening. Confidence in political parties is falling, in part because voters do not perceive any differences among their platforms.

The authors of the Forum article said they believed that the approval ratings of politicians currently in power are falling particularly rapidly in the regions. Despite this increasing distrust of the authorities, voters do not seem to be very happy with the opposition politicians in the parliament either. All the parties in the Duma "are perceived as clearly incapable of solving [voters'] problems in cooperation with those who hold the monopoly on power." For this reason, as United Russia's rating plummets, those of the opposition parties follow suit and fall even faster.

United Russia has discredited itself thanks to unpopular laws passed by the Duma. The party is regularly mocked by the press, and the intellectual weakness of its members is often apparent. Nonetheless, around 20 percent of those polled supported the party. At the same time, Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party is supported by no more than 5 percent of voters. In May, a series of polls revealed that the Communists had the votes of about 7 percent of the electorate, though the party itself insisted that this figure should be closer to 20 percent. The national referendum the party announced and fought the Central Elections Commission to hold has yet to yield any substantial results. This is not all that surprising. The hustle and bustle surrounding the referendum was thought up to help the party avoid having to deal with current issues. This way, the party did not have to hold any strikes, marches or demonstrations. All party activists had to do was go around gathering signatures and bide their time. The party, its leaders apparently thought, would conduct the referendum, and after its results were tallied, the oppressive regime would disappear on its own.

True, another poll published in May portrayed the situation slightly differently, with 9 percent of voters supporting the Communists. However, even this figure is significantly less than the percentage the party enjoyed before the December 2003 Duma elections, which proved devastating to the Communists.

All the other parties have the support of a scant 2 percent to 3 percent of the population. And if you add up the support for all parties currently in the Duma, you wind up with 40 percent at most, even with the more generous estimate of Communist Party support.

In estimating the decline in popularity of right of center and liberal parties, the authors of the Forum article for some reason referred to a "seasonal decline." Apparently, all the supporters of the Union of Right Forces are on vacation somewhere abroad, and therefore could not participate in the polls. Yet it is not impossible to find Communist Party voters relaxing in the Crimea, Turkey or Cyprus, where, some say, Communist Party sponsors have built some lovely villas for themselves.

However, this is not the most important aspect of all these figures. All the polls are similar, in that nationalist and patriotic parties such as Rodina are not gaining from their liberal opponents' loss of popularity. Quite the opposite: The two sides, like Siamese twins, are sinking together.

It's not surprising in this situation that the groups that once fought each other tooth and nail are now merrily planning to join forces. All sorts of various and sundry bizarre coalitions are springing up across the country. Some of them have formed to promote former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a candidate running for a wide range of different offices.

Like a drowning man clutching at straws, politicians who are losing electoral support are trying to find their salvation in a former oligarch who is currently sitting behind bars. Alas, these alliances do not inspire much optimism.

And this gamble does not bode well for Khodorkovsky either. Not only will he be unable to drag anyone out of the waves, but he is very likely to go under himself.

The groups, movements and parties that we have inherited from the 1990s are slowly dying out as they gradually lose public support. Yet there are no new political forces stepping in to take their place. There are only artificially cultivated political projects cooked up by the specialists in the presidential administration like United Russia or Rodina. Actually, these specialists did a pretty good job thinking up and creating these parties, as the results of the most recent elections testify. It's a shame that the only real public needs they reflected were the career advancement of the bureaucrats who were involved in them. For this very reason, their success was short-lived.

Inevitably, the political vacuum that is forming in Russia must be filled sooner or later by some force. Most probably this will be a movement operating outside the parliament. But in any case the time is coming for a force ready to fight the system.

Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute for Globalization Studies.

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