Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Electoral reforms and democratization 131previous regional elections: the Russian Party of Pensioners, Rodina and theAPR. Identical means of pressure were applied six months apart to the RPPand Rodina: mass non-admission to regional elections combined with acampaign to discredit the party leaders. Major problems also arose foranyone who tried to create ‘new’ democratic parties, such as the RepublicanParty (whose virtual leader was Ryzhkov) and the Democratic Party (whichKasyanov unsuccessfully tried to lead).A certain increase (mainly symbolic) in the powers of the regional executivebody served as the carrot, accompanied by a promise to allocate fundsto so-called ‘national projects’ and the right for the region itself to decidewhen the new law on local government would come fully into force (it wascontrol over local government that governors had fought for most stubbornly),as it involved a considerable reallocation of power from the regionalto a lower level. Parties ‘that had won in regional elections’ were given theright to submit a candidate for governor 8 to the President of Russia, and thiswould be a further stimulus for governors to head the United Russia list andmobilize all the administrative resources in support of the party of power. Inthis instance votes for parties in regional elections effectively turned into avote in favour of the regional governor.Eleven electoral campaigns took place under these conditions at the endof 2005. Elections took place in another eight regions on 12 March 2006, thefirst of the so-called ‘single voting days’. In all, nineteen regional parliamentswere elected during this period (see Table 6.3).The results of the set of measures described above were on the one handthe mass appearance of governors heading the United Russia list and consequentlydifferent results for this party compared to the previous electionsof 2004-5, and on the other hand the transfer of a proportion of the protestvote from the RPP and Rodina, which were being repressed, to the CPRF,which was clearly rising again: there was also a further increase in the percentageof votes which were cast ‘against all’ candidates.At the end of 2005 governors thus headed the ‘party of power’ lists in fiveof the twelve regions where there had been elections to legislative assemblies,and after the elections of 12 March 2006 it was five out of eight. Initially thisbore fruit. United Russia’s results increased in eight cases out of twelve inthe elections at the end of 2005, but with the continuation of the ‘administrativeoverstatement’ the administrative triumph of November–December2005 was clearly in recession by the spring of 2006. On the ‘single votingday’ of 12 March 2006, only four of the eight regions showed a clear increasein the vote for United Russia (the Khanty-Mansiskii AO and Kursk,Orenburg and Nizhnii Novgorod Oblasts) and in another two there was adrop (Kirov Oblast and Adygeya Republic), and in the latter it was almostcatastrophic – from 51.3 per cent to 33.7 per cent – and this despite the factthat, in the opinion of the opposition, this was an exaggerated result forUnited Russia in the region. In the Altai Republic and Kaliningrad Oblastthe improvement was purely symbolic, with hardly any change, even though