| MOSCOW -- The reformist Yabloko party's major financier
is in jail and his
money has stopped coming just weeks before Russia's parliamentary elections.
The party's public relations agency was raided by prosecutors who carted
off
computers containing party campaign plans and haven't given them back.
But Yabloko faces a much more serious problem: widespread voter
disillusionment with the democracy movement it once led. Heading into
the
Dec. 7 elections, the party is hovering at around 5 percent in the polls,
as
is the Union of Right Forces, the only other party to endorse a
market-oriented democratic agenda. If they fall below that threshold,
they
will not officially be represented in the next term of the lower house
of
parliament.
That outcome would, in effect, spell the democrats' extinction as a
meaningful force in Russian politics, according to analysts. Parliament
would be left dominated by a pro-government party whose only campaign
pledge
is to stick close to President Vladimir Putin and a Communist Party consumed
by nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
"The next big setback, without a doubt, will be if (the Union of
Right
Forces) and Yabloko fail to make it into the parliament. In fact, it's
the
only drama of this election," said Michael McFaul, a Stanford University
professor who has written extensively on Russian elections. "Internally,
they're scared to death in both parties."
Sergei Ivanenko, who
is running Yabloko's campaign, acknowledged deep concern. "The situation
in the country," he said, "is not favorable for liberal democratic
parties."
Theirs is a crisis that mirrors the broader problems of democracy under
Putin, who has closed or taken over the country's independent television
networks, recentralized power in Moscow and given increasing authority
to KGB veterans like himself. Yabloko's leader,
Grigory Yavlinsky, calls the Putin system "capitalism with a
Stalinist face," but fewer and fewer Russians are listening to Yavlinsky.
Instead of uniting at a time when they each say Russian democracy is
under
greater threat than it has been since the Soviet Union collapsed 12 years
ago, the two parties are rivals.
"The entire democratic part of the society demands that we stop
fighting,"
said Irina Khakamada, one of the leaders of the Union of Right Forces.
"The
time is now to put out the fire and not to say who is bad and who is good."
Their collective fall from influence is in part the story of the broader
failure of democratic institutions, including genuine political parties,
to
take hold in post-Soviet Russia. Twenty-three parties will compete in
next
month's elections, but only the Communists are considered by experts to
be
an authentic national party with a real grassroots following.
United Russia, the pro-Putin party created by Kremlin strategists four
years
ago, leads the Communists narrowly in the polls but in many communities
has
little local presence. Its leaders refuse to debate the other parties,
offer
no platform other than support for the president and, being in "the
party of
power," urge voters to cast ballots for them on the assumption that
their
victory is inevitable.
A significant portion of United Russia's votes, pollsters say, will
come
from would-be democrats who have soured on the two democratic parties,
having tired of their feuding or simply grown skeptical of their ability
to
push through needed reforms. Independent pollster Boris Dubin has called
such voters "disappointed liberals."
But the decline of the democrats is also a measure of Russians'
disillusionment with the capitalist experiments of the past decade with
which the two parties are identified.
At most, according to many pollsters and academic experts, one-third
of the
country shares the vision of a liberal democracy advanced by Yabloko and
the
Union of Right Forces. The majority rejects it, preferring a more
authoritarian government, like the one Putin is shaping.
"These two parties can be compared to the left-center and right-center
parties that have emerged in Central Europe," said Alexei Makarkin,
an
analyst at the Center for Political Technologies, a research organization.
"But those parties together constitute 70 to 80 percent of the electorate,
and altogether here, they have only 10 to 12 percent total. This shows
how
low democratic support is. All these conversations about uniting are a
result of their weakness."
See also:
State Duma elections
2003
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