MOSCOW, June 18 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – Last week President Vladimir Putin took the helm of a quasi-political movement officially meant to help ordinary Russians inform the Kremlin of problems that need solving. But analysts remained skeptical about the organization’s stated aims, wondering why genuine feedback from society should have to go through the president’s office.
More likely, experts said, the new People’s Front for Russia will serve as a multipurpose political tool for the Kremlin, capable, for example, of creating a false impression of civic engagement in decision-making or providing a springboard for candidates in upcoming elections.
The Presidential Handshake
The movement should be a forum where “people with differing, even seemingly opposite views can gather, discuss problems and find acceptable ways of solving these problems,” Putin said in a short speech at the Front’s June 12 founding congress, where he was selected to lead the movement – his informal campaign vehicle in last year’s elections.
The scheduled vote for leader was scrapped after the crowd of delegates started chanting Putin’s name. The movement also changed its name from the All-Russia People’s Front (ONF) to People’s Front for Russia.
Olga Timofeyeva, one of the three co-chairs appointed to manage the movement’s day-to-day operations, underscored its focus on Putin personally.
“It’s a way of reaching the president through three handshakes,” Timofeyeva, a journalist-turned-parliament member, told RIA Novosti on Thursday, saying the Front will let people inform the Kremlin about their concerns bypassing Russia’s heavily bureaucratized state machinery.
But pundits criticized such a mechanism as inefficient and counterproductive, since resolving people’s problems should be the job of existing state institutions, which the new movement seemed to be discrediting rather than strengthening.
“Why do you even need institutions if you can reach the president through handshakes?” quipped Vladimir Frolov, a political scientist and head of a public and government relations company in Moscow.
Neither Putin nor any People’s Front functionaries spelled out a specific agenda for the group, which plans to formally register with the Justice Ministry after the congress. The movement’s budget also remains unknown, though organizers said it would be financed through member donations, not state funding.
However, if the Kremlin wants to be flexible in choosing how to use the new movement, this haziness may be useful.
“The Front's amorphous structure is an advantage for the Kremlin, which does not like binding rules,” said analyst Maria Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “The Front would not be tying their [the authorities’] hands.”
Civil Society Lite
One possible use for the People’s Front is to create an impression that Russia’s civil society supports the government and has a say in decision-making, Lipman said.
This would not be the first time the Kremlin has created top-down organizations that position themselves as civil society groups.
In 2005, the presidential administration created the pro-government youth movement Nashi and the Public Chamber, an advisory body tasked with mediating between the public and the government. Last year, it organized pro-Putin rallies in Moscow as a counter-balance to the anti-Kremlin demonstrations sparked by controversial elections in 2011-2012. It also waged a high-profile anti-corruption campaign against public officials – a mission analogous to one that won great popularity for a key figure in the opposition movement, whistle-blowing blogger Alexei Navalny.
“The Kremlin is worried by grassroots activism, and has decided to neutralize it – in part, by creating ‘its own,’ imitation grassroots activity,” Lipman said.
The impact and success of the state-backed projects has been limited at best, she added, with none of them managing to displace genuine grassroots activism, which has propelled a number of well-publicized campaigns in recent years. These include the wildfire relief effort of 2010, a large-scale vote-monitoring drive at parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011-2012 and ongoing anti-government protests in the capital.
Indeed, no prominent independent activists have so far expressed the desire to throw in their lot with Putin’s new initiative. Navalny mocked Timofeyeva as an “android” affiliated with the ruling United Russia party in a blog post after the congress.
And Alexei Dozorov, a champion of motorists’ rights whose informal group, the Blue Buckets, hounds officials spotted violating traffic rules and abusing road privileges, said the group had considered joining the People’s Front when it first emerged in 2011, but found its ties to government potentially compromising.
“We don’t mind cooperating with the authorities, but we won’t become affiliated with them,” Dozorov said.
Flexible Election Machine
Analysts also noted that the People’s Front could become a source of pro-Kremlin candidates who are loyal to Putin but have not been tarnished by United Russia’s flagging prestige and faltering reputation. (The party, which now holds 238 seats in the 450-seat State Duma, has seen its ratings decline 14 percent since 2009, according to the state-run Public Opinion Foundation, and several of its Duma deputies had to give up their seats to avoid expulsion over questionable assets or business activity prohibited for lawmakers. Although it has existed for about a decade, United Russia has no clear agenda other than supporting the Kremlin and has struggled to shake the “party of crooks and thieves” label slapped on it by Navalny in 2011.)
People’s Front activists have said repeatedly that the movement would not be political; however, it has long been associated with various elections – starting with its inception in 2011 as an informal grouping of Putin’s campaigners in his run for a third term as president.
Moreover, 87 of the 238 lawmakers who entered the Duma on United Russia’s ticket in 2011 were People’s Front members included on the party’s candidate list as part of an agreement brokered by the Kremlin.
Russia will have a wave of local gubernatorial and legislative elections on September 8 and new Duma elections are set for 2016. A Kremlin-backed bill that passed the first of the three required readings in the Duma in April would reopen the doors for candidates unaffiliated with a party – so-called single-mandate candidates – to run for seats in parliament’s lower house. This would free People’s Front candidates from the necessity of running on United Russia’s ticket.
On Monday, incumbent Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin filed his paperwork to run for reelection as an independent candidate, not on United Russia’s ticket; a major figure in the People’s Front, deputy Duma speaker Lyudmila Shvetsova, said she would be Sobyanin’s campaign manager.
In general, Lipman pointed out, the Putin-led movement would be attractive to careerists looking to get on the Kremlin’s good side.
