Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

170 Petr PanovThe years 2003-4 became a turning point. It became clear that in line withthe newly adopted electoral legislation that future regional assembly electionwould be based on a mixed electoral system. Discussions around the drawingup of the ‘Regional Legislature Election Law’ revealed a marked conflict ofinterests. Some (mainly non-party) deputies insisted on doubling thenumber of seats in the regional legislature. This would allow the retentionin the assembly of all the single-mandate seats, and give a powerful boostto the incumbents’ prospects for re-election. The regional administration, onthe contrary, wanted to retain the same number of seats (40): the smaller thelegislature the easier it would be for the executive power to bargain withthe deputies, since such political bargaining was common practice in theinterrelations between branches of power in the region. The debate resultedin a compromise. It was decided that the legislature would consist of 60seats: 30 from single-member constituencies and 30 from proportionalrepresentation/party lists. The issue of the electoral threshold spurred no lessvigorous debate. While strong parties were interested in a higher threshold,the smaller ones, on the contrary, insisted on a lower one. As a result, a 7 percent threshold was agreed. 42The new electoral system significantly speeded up the process of setting upregional branches of political parties. There are presently over 25 of them.The most influential among them is undoubtedly the regional branch of the‘party in power’, United Russia. The latter is known to have been created in2001 as a result of a merger between Unity and Fatherland-All Russia(OVR). Unity was originally created as an official ‘party in power’ formobilizing the electorate to support the Kremlin in the 1999 State Dumaelections. OVR was a bloc of influential regional leaders (Tatarstan, Moscow,St. Petersburg, etc.), and in 1999 was the principal opponent to Unity. Inreality, however, both parties were Kremlin-backed ‘parties of power’. Theirtemporary, though no less fierce, confrontation was caused by an exacerbationof the power struggle within the ruling elite which erupted in the period1998-9, on the eve of President Yeltsin’s resignation. Therefore, there wasnothing unexpected in the fact that after the Duma elections in 1999, Unityand OVR consolidated their power in the State Duma and created a united‘party of power’ (‘United Russia’).It looked as if originally the founders of Unity and OVR were moreinterested in regional politicians than the latter were in them. Both partiesmade use of administrative resources and personal connections to recruitmembers and open regional branches. Therefore, the process of party formationto a larger extent was based on political bargaining and an exchangeof resources between political actors (for example, a certain contribution toparty funds was exchanged for business preferences), rather than on commonpolitical values. It was not by accident that most leaders of those partieswere high-ranking civil servants or directors of large enterprises. Thinkingstrategically, Perm’s most influential regional actors sent their representativesto the governing bodies of both parties. For example, Vladimir Nelyubin