Ballot Box Humor
// Altai Territory Elects Professional Humorist as Governor
Gubernatorial Elections
The sensational news that Kommersant reported in yesterday’s issue has become official. According to information from the territorial election committee, entertainer Mikhail Yevdokimov has been elected governor of Altai Territory with a 3% lead over incumbent Aleksandr Surikov. This victory may be the first sign of the process of replacing the old Yeltsin-era elite with new politicians of the “late Putin-era draft”.
An Expected Sensation
The outcome of the election was clear by 21:00 local time on Sunday when the territorial election committee had received data from 29% of the polling stations. Aleksandr Surikov was leading in rural districts, but voters in the large cities, i.e., Barnaul and Biisk, put Mikhail Yevdokimov in the lead. The governor, who was awaiting the election results at home, learned of his defeat from an assistant. His headquarters, which had served more as a public waiting room during the elections, was closed on Sunday. Mr. Surikov’s supporters were following the vote counting in a small room at the territorial administration building. The mirth and election jokes gradually changed to melancholy silence. Supporters shaken by the news of the impending change of power wandered aimlessly along the corridors for a while before going home. People in the governor’s election headquarters told Kommersant yesterday that Mr. Surikov was not planning to contest the election results.
Members of Mikhail Yevdokimov’s staff awaited the results and accepted congratulations in the Polzunov Restaurant not far from the territorial administration building. A spontaneous holiday mood reigned in the restaurant even before the announcement of the first results. Mikhail Yevdokimov kept in touch with his delegates by phone from Moscow.
On Monday, the territorial election committee’s telephones were ringing off the hook with calls from people wanting to know how to contact the new territorial leader to congratulate him on his election. The callers included people well known and respected in the territory. Others considered telephone communications unreliable and arrived at the administration building early in the morning to personally congratulate Mr. Yevdokimov. However, the cause of the excitement, who had arrived in Barnaul on morning flight from Moscow, was not at the administration yesterday. And they refused to accept bouquets in the governor’s chamber, which still had Aleksandr Surikov’s name on the doors.
Olga Agafonov, head of the territorial election committee, announced that the new governor would assume his duties within ten days of the official summary of the election results. But he first had to give up any authority not compatible with his status as governor (Mikhail Yevdokimov is manager and founder of OOO Yevdokimov Theater). According to Olga Esilevskaya, Mr. Yevdokimov’s press secretary, the governor’s top priorities include an audit and inventory of everything inherited from the previous governor. The objective of these moves is to find a way to get Altai Territory out of crisis. According to Ms. Esilievskaya, the administrative structure will be overhauled, but no repressive measures are planned in the course of reorganization.
Shock and Awe
The election results shocked the territory’s political and business elite, who supported the incumbent governor. “If I’d known that Surikov, was a colossus with feet of clay, I would have run for governor myself,” many Altai politicians commenting unofficially on the news of the governor’s defeat said on Sunday night. We note that all of the region’s political forces from the Communist Party to United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya) supported the former governor in the elections, which along with the administrative resources available to the governor should have ensured him a victory in the first round. Thus apparently Mr. Surikov did not resort to political consultants for help in the first round but made regional administration officials responsible for the election campaign.
However, he clearly underestimated his opponents, who acted according to a single script. Kommersant’s source at the election headquarters of former State Duma deputy Vladimir Semenov (who received 0.16% of the vote in the first round) acknowledged that each of the governor’s opponents had his own task. Humorist Yevdokimov was supposed to make only a positive impression on voters with his promise that “everything will be fine”. The former deputy, on the other hand, was assigned the role of harsh critic of the government in power. He was also entrusted with the legal part of the campaign: Vladimir Semenov was the one who disputed the legality of Mr. Surikov’s registration, first in the territorial court and then in the RF Supreme Court. The third “actor”, Vitaly Surikov, a private security service marksman from Rostov-on-Don, did not have to do anything: the governor’s namesake only had to draw votes away from inattentive supporters. As a result, he received 2.8% of the vote, which was exactly what the governor needed to win in the first round.
According to Kommersant’s source, this operation was coordinated with one more candidate—Sergei Shabalin, head of Altaienergo, who did not campaign at all before the first round, but came in third with 4.31% of the vote. The source confirmed that based on the results of the structural reorganization of the regional administration promised by Mikhail Yevdokimov’s headquarters, the head of the territorial power company should become head of the territorial government. This means that given Mr. Yevdokimov’s lack of a team or any experience in regional administration, power industry officials will form the new government and Mr. Shabalin will become its real leader.
Yesterday Ms. Esilevskaya categorically denied rumors that a certain Rostov coal company had anything to do with Mikhail Yevdokimov’s election campaign: “That’s a lie! A total lie! Mikhail Sergeevich is not connected with the coal industry in any way.” A worker at Mr. Semenov’s campaign headquarters told Kommersant that the rumor about the Rostov coal company was purposely launched during the campaign in order to ward off any suspicions of a “power industry consortium” that had financed the campaigns of a number of candidates for governor.
A Bright Future
The sensational results of the Altai elections cannot be assessed in isolation from the results of other recent gubernatorial campaigns. Three governors running for a third term have lost elections in the last three weeks: besides Altai Territory, this includes the leaders of Ryazan and Arkhangelsk regions. Sociologists believe that voters in these regions realized they had a real opportunity to “replace tiresome governors’” and took this opportunity with pleasure.
It is also worth noting that the people who replaced the “political heavyweights” in these regions previously had nothing to do with the political or economic elite. Neither entertainer Yevdokimov nor former Air Force commander Georgy Shpak, who won the elections in Ryazan Region, had ever been involved in politics; and the new governor of Arkhangelsk Region, Nikolai Kiselev, who was head of OAO Milk (Moloko) in Arkhangelsk, could hardly be considered a big businessman. Therefore, the results of these elections are probably worth regarding as the birth of a new regional elite that is replacing the “old Yeltsin guard” of the 1990s and the members of the “forces” who came into power en masse after Vladimir Putin was elected president.
However, these changes were made possible only because the Kremlin basically kept out of regional elections this time instead of rigidly controlling the campaigns as it had in the past, and this gave provincial politicians the chance to prove their worth independently. If the Kremlin is satisfied with the results of the spring election battles, the next wave of gubernatorial elections scheduled for fall and winter 2004 could lead to sensational results in other Russian regions similar to the ones in Altai Territory.
Aleksandra Voronina, Barnaul; Alla Barakhova, Dmitry Kamyshev
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 06, 2004
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Photo: www.echomsk.ru
