An unidentified member of the Homeland faction in the Duma takes part in the faction meeting to discuss the bill on the parliamentary opposition. The meeting was held in the State Duma.
Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin
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Opposition Dreams
While the Communists are preparing their revolution of agitation, Homeland has begun a legislative revolution with a bill on opposition before the Duma. Of course, it won't pass. But it is nonetheless interesting to see what Homeland lacks to become a full-fledged opposition.
The proposed law “On Legal Guarantees for Opposition Activity in the Russian Federation” was drafted just after the hunger strike by five deputies of the Homeland faction right in the Duma. Their action did not lead to the resignation of the administration, but it egged Homeland on to the bill, which is to “stop the monopolization of the parliament by United Russia.” That is clearly why almost the whole bill is devoted to parties that have a faction in the Duma or regional or municipal parliaments. Parties without factions were treated in a single article that guaranteed them the right to public actions and the requirement of state and municipal broadcasters to include “in daily informational programming reports of all public actions” conducted by the non-parliamentary opposition.
The parliamentary opposition is intended to receive a lot more. For example, every opposition faction is to have places reserved for it, proportionally to its size, in the chamber council with the right to a deciding vote, and a share in positions as heads of committees and first deputy heads in committees headed by majority members. Almost of these standards had been on the Duma rules. After United Russia achieved a constitutional majority in the Duma, they decided not to share power and rewrote the rules so that they occupied all decisive positions. Homeland is thus suggesting that intra-Duma rules be raised to the level of federal legislation in order to protect future Dumas.
But even more than positions of power, the current opposition dreams of having access to the state media. Homeland holds that the opposition should have no less than 10 percent of the coverage in reports from the Duma. When the percentage is converted into minutes, their dream is minimalist. The average TV news story about the Duma lasts two to three minutes, and a soundbite on the radio about 40 seconds. That means that it would be enough for journalists to devote 12-18 seconds of TV airtime and 4 seconds on the radio.
It is interesting that the opposition is more interested in the time the media give to the activities of the administration. The minority wants a minimum of 20 percent of that material. That is to say that, out of the same two minutes of reporting from the White House, they want 24 whole seconds, which is actually enough to expose, briefly but profitably, the “criminality” of the regime to the country.
But these informational perks are not for every party, the drafters think. First, they have to be officially registered as the opposition. And the party must specify whom exactly they oppose: the federal government, regional administration or municipality. That is the exhaustive list of possible targets. Strangely enough, the president is missing from it. Dmitry Rogozin told Vlast analytic weekly that there is no subtext here. Simply they are concerned with “collective participants in opposition activities and, as a collective organ of citizens, they can only oppose another collective organs, the party in power, and opposition to the president is assumed in silence”
Having chosen their object of opposition, the party must hold a congress or plenum of its leaders, pass a decision to join the opposition and revise its program. Then, within two weeks, the party must publish, for free, in the state media its new program and turned in documents for registration to the Ministry of Justice. The Ministry of Justice, representing the “criminal regime,” has the right to refuse to register the party. Homeland holds that a party whose membership exceeds more than half the deputies in the Duma cannot have opposition status. There have been times when the parliament as a whole was in opposition to the administration and the president, such as the Supreme Soviet of the early 1990s and the second Duma of 1995-1996. But Homeland considers that situation highly unlikely in today's Russia.
In addition, a party cannot be considered in the opposition if even a single one of its members is a member of the administration or heads a federal body of executive power. That would exclude the eternal opposition of Yabloko. One of that party's deputy chairmen, Igor Artemyev, heads the Federal Antimonopoly Service. Homeland does meet all of its qualifications, however. It has a small Duma faction; it opposes all the actions of the administration, but not the president (in contrast to the Communists, for example, who oppose Putin's policies most stringently of all) and not one of its members is in the Cabinet. So, if the bill should be passed, Rogozin would receive an automatic monopoly on opposition (keeping in mind that, at the critical moment, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has always supported the executive power).
But Homeland does not really have a monopoly, and its co-internees in the opposition camp are in no hurry to support it.
Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Ivan Melnikov thinks that a law guaranteeing the rights of the opposition “of course is needed… and is exceptionally important.” In the law on opposition prepared by the Communists in 1996, which passed its first reading and then was put in “cold storage,” emphases were placed differently. In addition to a guarantee of “equal access to the media,” the most important place was given to the right of the parliamentary opposition to form a “shadow administration” with a “shadow cabinet” that would have access to sessions of the real administration and ministries.
The democratic opposition was highly skeptical of Homeland's dream. Independent deputy from St. Petersburg Oksana Dmitrieva spoke up for the rights of deputies from single-mandate districts, who are not mentioned in the bill and who have trouble being seen in the media twice a month, as the current law “On Coverage of the Organs of State Power in the State Media” mandates. A tradition of respect for minority opinion comes about, Dmitrieva says, only when the parliamentary majority understands that the minority is a type of filter that protects it from errors such as the law on the monetization of benefits.
The Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko, which did not overcome the 5-percent barrier in the last elections, had very similar reactions. Secretary of the Presidium of the Federal Politcouncil of SPS Boris Nadezhdin called the bill absurd, since it is unimportant within the presidential vertical of power whether or not a party has a faction in the Duma. Yabloko deputy in the Duma Sergey Popov opined that the Homeland bill would allow even United Russia to become the opposition. All they would have to do is to split their superfaction into several smaller factions, remaining loyal to the president, and announce their opposition to the administration.
The future that Homeland dreams of is clearly not to be. Representatives of the Duma majority have no intention of sharing power. United Russia member Valery Grebennikov, deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Criminal and Administrative Legislation, told Vlast that that the rights of the opposition are fully tolerably protected by “current laws on parties, social organizations and on guarantees of election rights.” Andrey Isaev, another member of United Russia and head of the Duma Committee on Labor and Social Policy, is sure that the rights of the minority are preserved in the press because the opposition has its own media that have “been turned into battle weapons.” To prove his point, Isaev said that he is unable to get an interview on radio station Ekho Moskvy.
About other rights of the minority, Isaev said that “they don't exist because there is no tradition.” Until those traditions arise, Isaev added, the opposition will have to hold hunger strikes and think of “tricks to draw extra public attention to itself.”
Viktor Khamraev
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 21, 2005
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