Putin Wins Vote to Limit Parties

A bill with the power to wipe out the majority of the country's political parties and put the remaining few under close government scrutiny was passed by the State Duma in the second and crucial reading Thursday.

Amendments to the bill made it even more rigid than the harshly criticized draft submitted by President Vladimir Putin and approved in a first reading this winter. Deputies considered about 1,600 amendments in Thursday's session, which stretched late into the evening.

According to the bill, which passed 261-56, only an organization registered as a "political party" will have the right to participate in elections on any level ?€” from regional to federal.

To become a party, a group would have to open branches in at least half of Russia's 89 regions, with no fewer than 100 members in each region and an overall minimal membership of 10,000. On Thursday the deputies went a step further, stipulating that any branches opened in the remaining regions have at least 50 members.

This provision is bound to wipe out the majority of the 188 existing parties, whose membership falls far below the requested minimum. Statistics are scarce, and the only ones to come up with membership figures were the Communists, who say they have 300,000 members.

Pro-Kremlin Unity is shy about disclosing its membership numbers, as are all the other Duma parties. Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces are estimated to have between 5,000 and 10,000.

But analysts agree that the veteran Duma parties will manage to boost their membership in the two years given as a transition period. These include Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and the Agrarians.

The ones condemned to certain extinction are the regional parties, which will lose the right to participate even in local elections.

Many regional parliaments ?€” in Tatarstan or Dagestan, for instance ?€” are filled with representatives of parties that exist only in those republics, while the big federal parties have almost no representation. What these local parties are likely to do is choose which of the national parties to join.

These changes correspond with Putin's efforts to centralize political life and limit the power of the regions. They further the president's wish to see "order" imposed on the diverse Russian political scene, which will soon have clearly defined parties numbering in the single digits.

Some have already read the writing on the wall and started merging ?€” the Union of Right Forces will hold its founding congress Saturday in order to transform from a loose coalition of small parties into a large political organization.

Even those parties that survive will not have an easy time of it. They will have to submit their books for regular inspection to the tax police. The government will have the right to ask for the personal data of party members in order to check whether a party has the required 10,000 members. And if a party does not participate in two elections in a row, it risks closure.

Under the bill passed Thursday, a party's charter and political program can be scrutinized by the Justice Ministry and the Prosecutor General's Office, which will have the right to suspend the party or ask for its closure. But the prosecutor's powers could still be curbed.

By the end of Thursday's debate, the deputies changed their minds and passed an amendment that forbids the prosecutor from supervising parties, leaving this power solely with the Justice Ministry. They agreed to submit the legislation to another second reading to address the contradiction between the bill and the amendment.

Liberal lawmakers' only success Thursday was the passage of two amendments forbidding the closure of a party after the date of parliamentary elections has been announced or after the party has received its Duma mandate.

The only real battle was fought over an amendment allowing private citizens to give cash contributions to the parties ?€” a provision the Kremlin's representatives fought hard against, accusing the Duma of enabling contributors to launder money through the parties.

Deputies agreed that the maximum yearly cash contribution from a single citizen cannot be more than 10 minimum wages (2,000 rubles, or about $70) and that the donor should leave his full name and birth date with the party. But contributions made by bank transfer can go as high as 10,000 minimum wages (2 million rubles or $70,000.)

Similar limitations go for companies and other legal entities, which will be able to contribute a maximum of 100,000 minimum wages a year, or 20 million rubles, and only through bank transfer. Companies that are at least 50 percent foreign-owned or 30 percent government-owned will not be allowed to donate to parties. The overall amount of private campaign contributions a party is allowed to gather is 10 million minimum wages (2 billion rubles or $70 million).

The president's representative to the Duma, Alexander Kotenkov, pushed through an amendment banning parties from running commercial clubs, libraries or schools.

"And the rest of the money a party should gather from selling its badges," the head of the committee in charge of the bill, Viktor Zorkaltsev, commented sourly.

The other option for parties is to seek state campaign funding, available to all parties that gather more than 3 percent of the vote. Under the bill passed Thursday, the state will pay 0.005 minimum wages, or about 1 ruble, for every vote ?€“ 2 1/2 times more than was initially envisaged.

The most ardent opponent of the provision, the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, claimed such funding would make parties dependent on the state, but the most it managed to win was a stipulation saying that a party may refuse the money.

And a party that goes through all this trouble to have its representatives elected to the government will face a recommendation that ministers or other state functionaries "should not be tied by their party's policies when making their decisions." Many of them ?€” judges, prosecutors, justice officials, members of various secret services and even simple policemen ?€” will not be allowed to be party members at all.

This, the bill's opponents argue, transforms the Duma into a sort of nature reserve for the parties, which will be banned from executive government.

And while the parties are put under total bureaucratic control, "the government agencies ruling the country will stay outside the public scrutiny," the bill's loudest critic, Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, wrote in an essay published on the web site Utro.ru.

"This law should not be called the law on political parties, but rather the law on governmental control over the political parties," he said.

Georgy Satarov, the head of the Indem think tank who was once a political adviser to former President Boris Yeltsin, recently wrote that the Kremlin's wish was "not to improve the party system, but to make presidential and governmental influence on parties more efficient."

So why did the majority of deputies vote for such a bill? According to Andrei Ryabov, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, the explanation is another "historical compromise" made by the political elite with the Kremlin.

"They have just made themselves a virtually unchangeable political elite, closed to all outsiders, in exchange for their cooperative attitude toward the Kremlin," he said in a telephone interview Thursday.

"It will be very difficult to form a new party now, so their position is secure. They will have limited powers, but whatever they have will now be guaranteed for a long time to come."

Kotenkov, however, did not hide his satisfaction about the outcome. "We should finally start building a civilized multi-party system," Interfax quoted him as saying.

SPS Deputy Boris Nadezhdin agreed the vote was "a huge victory for the Kremlin" and said it meant "the end of liberal politics in Russia."