| On Friday morning, a mini-conference of the
"most bourgeois" party - the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS)
- will open at a luxury hotel in central Moscow. This will be
a mini-conference because formally this party gathering is called
the council of the party. Representatives of all the regions,
all the members of the Duma faction, and all the leaders will
be present. The SPS leader Boris Nemtsov is going to propose two
major innovations, which are supposed to change not only the SPS,
but the entire right-wing opposition.
The first novelty will shock the party organisation men. Now
they will have to assume e obligations - how many percent they
are going to win during elections. The more you suppose to win,
the higher you stand on the party list. Thus you have a better
chance to get into the Duma. But only if you fulfil your obligations.
Nemtsov believes that this is needed to make party members do
their best at the elections. He is going to assume such an obligation
himself, and if he does not carry it out, he will resign from
the post of party leader. The obligations involved have not been
disclosed. There are two variants for determining "individual
occupations". The first is a voluntary one. You choose for yourself,
realizing that if your aspirations are low, you will let your
colleagues have a place in the Duma, if your aspirations are too
high, you can kicked out. The second variant is a certain percentage,
for example, reached at the previous elections. In this case,
there should be a common lowering index. This is connected with
the fact that democratic parties have always lost a bit at each
successive election.
It still remains unclear if the party members will agree with
Boris Nemtsov’s proposal, especially as nobody knows what
would happen if all members obtain less support than they had
promised. You cannot sack everyone. So the party will get a powerful
leverage for controlling party staff.
The second initiative of Nemtsov is no less revolutionary, and
it concerns all liberal parties. He suggests that such parties
should propose candidates for president. There is nothing new
in this idea. The novelty consists in the following. The party
which gains the maximum votes will have a right to propose a candidate,
and the other parties will have to support this candidate. Notably
the Union of Right-Wing Forces, for example, if they gain the
maximum number of voices, can propose any candidate and not necessarily
one of their party leaders. According to the party leaders, this
will let us escape from the alternative Putin - Zyuganov, which
we are already tired of.
Evidently Nemtsov himself does not want to compete with Vladimir
Putin in 2004. It is interesting that the idea of t so-called
"primaries" has been strongly opposed by one of the likely candidates:
Grigory Yavlinsky. Sources in his staff have been saying that
he may soon be appointed Foreign Minister, which means he has
no time to consider Nemtsov's silly ideas. Yet we have the impression
that this appointment is just an invention of Yavlinsky's PR people,
who are trying to use it to explain his reluctance to cooperate
with the SPS. Moreover, Yabloko does not have good chances.
See also:
Presidential
Elections 2004
Yabloko
and SPS | 