THE WORLD / RUSSIA : An Electoral System Turns Politics Into a Circus, Imperiling Democracy

Boris N. Yeltsin’s future as president of Russia may be more closely connected to the political atmosphere surrounding next month’s parliamentary elections than to any rhythms of his ailing heart. That atmosphere can only be described as a circus, with the Russian disciples of Art Buchwald and Mel Brooks assigned the election stories. But below all the campaign antics and buffoonery is a disturbing trend toward political factionalism that may culminate in a new president with a softer commitment to democracy.

In their rush to rally around Grigory A. Yavlinsky’s party, Yabloko, after Russia’s Central Election Commission disqualified it from the Duma elections, the Western news media passed over rumors that the same Draconian measures had been applied to a little-known party with a long name, Progress and Legality: Democratic Unified Center. The reason: its acronym spelled an expletive (an apocalyptic Russian equivalent of the English “deep s---”). Such is the circus atmosphere permeating the election coverage, whether on TV or print media.

And the subjects eagerly oblige: from the Party of Beer Lovers, who collected the required signatures while treating their constituents to ale, to Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, which, among other things, promises a 30% increase in the standard of living of ordinary Russians by reviving the military-industrial complex alone.

Television, especially, displays a penchant for zeroing in on the funniest comedy routines in Russia’s new political theater. On Nov. 8, the premier evening news program, Novosti, showed the typically unflappable chairman of the Central Election Commission, Nikolai T. Ryabov, having a tantrum, throwing pencils and berating the country’s Constitutional Court. The court had just ruled he would have to reverse his commission’s rulings and qualify Yabloko and Alexander V. Rutskoi’s Great Power party.

Why such a circus? The structural reason can be found in the key principle of Russia’s election law, which sets aside half the Duma’s 450 seats to parties and the other half to individual candidates. To qualify, a party must present to the electorate a roster of candidates and collect 200,000 signatures from different constituencies (no more than 7% of the signatures must come from a single district). The framers of this law pursued a worthy goal: to encourage the growth of parties and coalitions, not just in the country’s few cosmopolitan centers, but in the provinces as well.

The result, so far, has been the opposite: increasing fragmentation and factionalism. Feeding this social calamity is the country’s open and boisterous electronic media, whose influence is further amplified by Russians’ strong propensity for theater. What has emerged, instead of a culture of strong parties and coalition politics, is the culture of political demagoguery on a colossal scale.

Party-building is hard work. Regrettably, most of the incentives favor the easy way out. To be represented in the Duma, a party must win, at least, 5% of the votes cast in the elections, and, of course, the people representing it will be the top-ranked names on the party’s slate: 12 names, if the party wins only 5%, and proportionately more if the number of votes is greater. It is not surprising that every potentially viable politician in Russia would like to see his name in the top-dozen of a given party list, thereby increasing his chances to become an MP.

Nor is it surprising to see many politicians jumping from the roster of one party to another, if the other party offers them a better chance to climb to the top of the slate. This party-hopping, after the requisite signatures had been collected, prompted the Central Election Commission to try and disqualify several parties, including Yavlinky’s.

Come Dec. 17, a Russian citizen will be confronted with a bewildering choice of 40 (currently registered) political parties competing for the Duma party seats and between 12 and 20 single-mandate candidates vying for the remaining 225 prizes. To compound the problem, only 25% of the eligible voters have to show up at the polls for the elections to be declared valid. Nor are there provisions for runoffs, which means a candidate in a crowded district may be a winner--even if he gets less than 10% of the votes.

The amorphousness and fragmentation of the political landscape on the eve of the parliamentary election make the Communist Party of Russia stand out from the crowd. Stripped of its monopoly on power, its ranks drastically thinned out because of its reputation as well as the availability of economic opportunity in Russia’s burgeoning private sector, CPR, paradoxically, is perhaps the only party in Russia in the Western sense of the term. Its organization is far-flung, its cadres are disciplined and its constituency devoted enough to march to the polls even if the weather beckons the rest of the electorate to spend the day in the country. The only problem for the CPR is that its constituency consists, by and large, of retired people, and even as the odds-on favorite, the party is not expected to win more than 12%-13% of the party-slate vote.

The coming political crisis, then, is not likely to stem from the Communists’ “victory at the polls.” They will not get enough seats to become the dominant player in the new Duma, a largely powerless body, as the Russian constitution of 1993 defined it. Rather, the crisis is the ever-increasing factionalism of the country’s political life. Indeed, a suspicion is spreading among some of the more thoughtful Russia watchers, both inside and outside the country, that the system that has emerged in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, in particular, the Duma electoral system, is dissipating, rather than strengthening, the country’s still powerful democratic impulse.

The circus atmosphere notwithstanding, the Public Opinion Foundation reported in its recent survey that the issues of social equity and crime , the special code words of the Communist Party and the nationalist right, are still less of concern to the Russians than democracy’s tried and true “rule of law” and “human rights.” The longer Russian politicians who identify with this popular agenda continue to squabble among themselves--in particular, Yeltsin--the greater the likelihood, to paraphrase the Federalist, that the Russian citizens’ “fear of discord and disunion among its counselors will exceed their apprehension of treachery or incapacity in a single individual.” Russia’s presidential election is scheduled for June 1996, and those “single individuals” whom the Federalist had in mind are standing in the wings.*