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The Importance of the Presidential Elections

The presidential election in Russia turned into a vote of confidence for Putin – and simultaneously into an appointment ritual for Medvedev. Within the framework of a duumvirate, the parting President will demand co-governance as the new Prime Minister.
A commentary by Margareta Mommsen.

By 10th December 2007 at the latest, the outcome of the presidential elections in Russia ceased being a surprise, when Putin presented First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as the Kremlin's favourite next presidential candidate. Many commentators see the day Putin announced his personal option as the actual election day. The official elections from 2nd March 2008 only affirmed Putin's previous choice.

Photo: AP

With 70.28% of the votes at an election turnout of nearly 70%, the results attested a definite mandate for Medvedev. It is striking though that the acclaim of the new President stayed marginally below the support Putin got during his re-election in 2004 (71.31%), yet quite a few percent above the 64.3% Putin's party "United Russia” achieved during the Duma election in December 2007. This signalises a previous arrangement to not let Medvedev's election success top Putin's victory from 2004 by all means. Yet it was allowed to top the number of votes for the state party during the Duma election, seeing as the election of the Head of State was more important. To ensure Medvedev's success precisely, the agents of the central and regional election committees did not shy away from the necessary corrections at the ballot box nor during the counting of votes. In any case, Russian as well as Western election observers noticed massive irregularities and the employment of intense administrative pressure on voters to tick the "right” box on the election day.

Regardless of all the manipulations and favouritism towards the Kremlin candidate, it is definitely clear that many voters were prepared to follow Putin's wish and opt for Medvedev. Opinion polls confirmed long before the election that a clear majority wanted to vote for any candidate Putin would suggest. Indeed, the presidential election in Russia turned into a vote of confidence for Putin – and simultaneously into an appointment ritual for Medvedev. Now obviously the victory of Medvedev, achieved as a plebiscite for Putin, means that the parting President will demand co-governance as the new Prime Minister within the framework of a duumvirate. This also matches the expectations of many citizens, according to latest surveys.

To be able to measure the ambivalent legitimacy of the presidential elections and the rather precarious functionality of the targeted double rule, we need to look at the basic characteristics of the "Putin System” and the most important stations of the controlled transfer of power. First of all, it has to be accounted for the fact that autocratic and oligarchic structures coexist in a complicated way within the "Putin System”, which means the President has to fulfil very different functions. On the one hand, he controls all official and social institutions from his position on top of the autocratic "vertical of power”. At the same time, he enjoys great popularity as omnipotent President thanks to comprehensive PR activities. But on the other hand, he also has to function as the cautious Manager of a heterogeneous oligarchic power syndicate behind the walls of the Kremlin. Here he has to take care of reconciling the different interests of all influential information groups. And he must be careful not to favour one insider party or the other and thus fall hostage to them. Hence, Putin's authority is based on maintaining his plebiscitary leadership on the one hand, and his managerial skills within the Kremlin's oligarchy on the other. Putin acts as the essential pivot between the autocratic and the oligarchic sector within the governance structure.

In such a personalist, plebiscitary and oligarchically structured system, how could a transfer of power to another person possibly work, and, what is more, by way of a democratic election? Tellingly enough, this physical impossibility has long been called the "2008 problem” in the Russian public, where it was also discussed as "operation successor”. When two half-official candidates from the closer entourage of Putin were admitted to a kind of test run for succession in the late autumn of 2005, the "operation” started showing its first definite outlines. You could spot the potential presidential candidates as they noticeably climbed up the regime's hierarchical ladder. Thus the previous Head of the President's Administration, Dmitry Medvedev, advanced into the excellent position of First Deputy Prime Minister; at the same time, former Defence Minister Sergej Ivanov was given the additional honour of a common Deputy Prime Minister. In February 2007, Ivanov gave up the Ministry of Defence and stepped onto the same rank as First Deputy Prime Minister Medvedev. Even if they were never formally introduced as presidential candidates, everyone realised that those two were the Kremlin's two favourites for the highest state office. Surveys called first the one, then the other the more successful pretender. While Medvedev's biography as a law professor and his political orientation marked him out more as a "liberal”, the former secret service agent Ivanov had his representation of the hawks and "Siloviki” to set against that. Regardless of these differences, the profiles of the two competitors became more and more similar. This strange metamorphosis indicated that it is not really opportune to publicly speak out for alternative objectives in a "controlled democracy”. In August 2007, surveys announced Ivanov being ahead of Medvedev.

Against this background, it was a decided matter for all Kremlinologists in Moscow that Ivanov would succeed the Prime Minister and subsequently the President, when on September 14, Putin suddenly fired Prime Minister Fradkov who had been in office since the spring of 2004. It came as a general surprise when instead of Ivanov, the totally unknown Chairman of the Financial Monitoring Committee, Viktor Zubkov, was appointed the new Prime Minister. So, the pattern of the power transfer from Yeltsin to Putin was not repeated. Instead, the castling that manoeuvred a classic Soviet apparatchik into the top government office, predominantly served to buy time and cover the actual Wars of the Diadochi that were being fought behind the Kremlin walls. If need be, Zubkov himself could have taken over a kind of "technical” presidency for an interim period, just to pass the baton back to a returning Putin after a certain period.

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