RUSSIA-ELECTIONS: ‘Others’ Also Run for President

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Strokan

MOSCOW, Jun 13 1996 (IPS) - Scanning the Russian media just three days ahead of the June 16 presidential ballot, it would seem that only two candidates are in the contest.

Nearly all press reports concern either Boris Yeltsin, the incumbent, or communist leader Gennadi Zuyganov. And the election is being presented in the media as only between free market reforms and the darkness of communism.

Indeed, according to the latest poll by the All-Russain Public Opinion Centre (VTSIOM), 40.4 percent of voters would support Yeltsin in the second round, against 33.7 percent for Zuyganov.

But there are nine other presidential hopefuls targetting a big constituency: the VTSIOM poll says at least 16 percent of the voters will not choose either Yeltsin or Zuyganov under any circumstances.

In May, three of the most prominent ‘other’ candidates said they were forming a “Third Force” that seemed the perfect “fit-all” blend. It included the liberal intellectual economist Grigori Yavlinsky, moderate nationalist General Alexander Lebed, and populist eye-doctor Svyatoslav Fyodorov.

Yavlinsky – youngest of these candidates – first became known in late 1991 when he presented his “500 days” economic revival plan to Gorbachev. It was rejected at the time, although Yavlinsky held a post of deputy premier for a short while.

Yavlinsky heads his own Yabloko party which currently has the third largest faction in the Duma (lower chamber of parliament). A liberal economist, he advocates a more gradual move toward a market economy.

He has rejected the “shock” reforms of current premier Viktor Chernomyrdin which involves price liberalization and massive sell- off of state enterprises.

“Supporting the local producer, not cutting down inflation at the expense of wages and social services is the primary goal,” he says.

But Yavlinsky’s image darkened in the eyes of Russian liberal intellectuals after the December 1995 parliamentary elections when his faction entered into behind-the-scene negotiations with the communists. That resulted in the trading of the post of the Duma speaker for several key parliamentary committee chairs.

General Lebed’s reputation was made in the breakaway Transdniester region of the former Soviet republic Moldova, where he commanded the 14th Army and with a firm hand prevented a break out of what could be civil war between the region and central Moldova administration.

His reputation is that of a somewhat stodgy “honest upstanding officer”. His chief campaign pitch is stopping the war in Chechnya and fighting crime. Lebed’s economic programme is little- known, although he says he is for continuation of market reforms and minimizing the state’s role in the economy.

The third and least popular of the three, eye-surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov, is professing his own brand of “people’s capitalism without the poor or excessively rich”. Derided by experts as a “well-meaning amateur”, he is suspected by some to have entered the race to save his eye-clinic from debts to the state.

According to VTSIOM polls, the combined rating of the three stands at 22 percent – large enough for a challenge. They have also received indirect support from former president Mikhail Gorbachev – himself a candidate with polls showing his support at only one percent of the electorate. Gorbachev has called on Russians to vote neither for Yeltsin nor for the Communists.

But, after agreement to join forces in May, the candidates failed to keep their promise of “selecting the worthiest among us to run for president”.

Today the coalition is loose. In fact, they have entered into negotiations with Yeltsin’s team, hoping to trade their potential votes for positions in the government.

The campaign of Yavlinsky is in disarray. “We don’t have any interaction with other parties… Yavlinsky doesn’t want to participate in rallies,” a Yabloko activist told IPS.

There is also the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He is expected to receive only 5-7 percent of the votes.

Businessman Vladimir Bryntsalov is another candidate. Like Martin Shakkum, chairman of the ‘Reform Fund’, a think tank, he is projected to receive one percent of the votes. The others are not expected to make much of a mark.

A second round of voting is needed if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes this Sunday. It is widely expected that this will be the case, although Yeltsin insists that he will win the presidency in the first round. “I even forbid my team to think of (a second round),” he repeated this week on a blitz campaign across the country.

The 65-year-old Yeltsin is again, as in 1991 – the year of the disintegration of the Soviet Union – pitching on a simple “Stop Communism” slogan.

But he is also actively using his powers to win over more votes by signing 2-3 presidential decrees a day – giving tax breaks to small landholders, compensation to people who lost their savings in the 1992-1995 hyperinflation, immediate financial injections into failing enterprises and so on.

His archrival Zuyganov on the other promises his mostly aged electorate to confiscate property of the “bourgeoisie”, a return to low, state-regulated prices and a planned economy, playing on nostalgia for the “old days of order and greatness of the Soviet Union”.

And if he can’t match Yeltsin in terms of largesse and vim, he has a much more disciplined army of voters at his disposal. Russians beyond retirement age – 55 for women and 60 for men – who are the mainstay of Zuyganov’s electorate, make up more than 20 percent of voters.

“The election race in Russia is at that last stage where emotions and perceptions matter, not facts,” Grigori Bondarevsky, leading research fellow with the Moscow-based Institute of Sociology told IPS. “And Yeltsin, who seemed hopelessly lethargic just four months ago, seems to be winning this game, although this doesn’t guarantee him am instant win.”

A commentator in the weekly magazine Itogi noted: “The Yeltsin- Zuyganov stand-off enters all conversations, even those about the recent heatwave in Moscow. Even a nice girl you meet on the bus asks about your voting preferences before jotting down her number.”

Yeltsin’s five-year reign has seen millions of blue-collar workers sliding into real poverty and a 60 percent fall in industrial output. According to the State Statistical Committee, life expectancy for men dropped from 63.8 to 58 years and for women from 74.3 to 71.1 in the same period.

And while the percentage of an average family’s budget spent on food climbed from 36 to 52 percent, the daily calory intake of a Russian dropped from 2,589 to 2,310.

The “new poor” also resent the proverbial wealth-flaunting “New Russians”, remembering the old Russian saying that “Honest labour won’t build a stone mansion”.

But the new rich are also having their complaints, mostly about what they see as excessive taxation, ever-changing laws, and the crime wave which is plaguing the country. More than 200 Russian businessmen were killed in the last 12 months, and the government seems powerless to stop this.

“I never was a communist. I considered the Party men dishonest,” says 50-year old Gennadi Merkushev, an electrical engineer from the city of Nizhny Novgorod. “But I don’t want Yeltsin either. You can’t create a country of millionaires overnight and leave the rest of us with nothing to eat.”