Page 64 - bne magazine September 2021_20210901

64 Opinion
bne September 2021
COMMENT:
Duma Elections 2021: Russia’s Communist Party looks interesting again
James C Pearce in Moscow
Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF) occasionally takes
its role as the main opposition party seriously. Its MPs voted against the constitutional amendments in 2020. They also came out against proposed changes to the pension laws and also opposed a law that would give former presidents legal immunity.
Sometimes the Kremlin returns the favour. The Kremlin is known to pressurise KPRF leadership when its membership gets a little rowdy. It also created the party ‘A Just Russia’ to attract other left-leaning voters away from the KPRF, lest it actually became attractive to voters, or indeed decided to be a full-time opposition party. This was confirmed again recently when former presidential candidate and member of Moscow’s Duma, Pavel Grudinin was barred from competing in 2021 elections for having foreign assets.
Truth be told, the KPRF is the only party that has ever come anywhere close to a real opposition party. Unlike most parties, systematic or liberal, it has a longstanding history pre-dating the Russian Federation. It has achievements to take ownership of and a dark past to overcome. Even in the most democratic of countries, it requires seismic changes for a new or smaller party to emerge as genuine contenders for government. Even then, timing is everything.
Although since the mid-late nineties the KPRF has never looked like winning, it has attracted new voters recently. In 2018, Grudinin increased the KPRF vote share. Much of this was in the Far East and Siberia, where the party even won a surprise gubernatorial election. A slither of those voters were tactical liberals, like in the Moscow Duma elections 2019, but they were also the young. Recent research also shows that the KPRF’s YouTube channel attracted the third highest traffic in the 2018 election, behind only Alexei Navalny and pro-Kremlin channels.
As bne IntelliNews contributor Mark Galeotti recently noted, the KPRF has done its job in the systematic opposition rather successfully the last twenty years. It soaked up older voters still nostalgic for the USSR as well as general leftist voters. They stood behind red banners, Stalin billboards and laid carnations at the Mausoleum, regurgitating the same talking
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Russia's Communist party is the only true opposition party in Russia with any hope of effectively opposing the ruling United Russia party, but so far it has been unwilling to rock the boat.
points – pensions, the Great Patriotic War and education. All, it must be said, are popular topics among ordinary Russians. The KPRF also steered clear of United Russia’s (UR) core voters – government employees and public sector workers, and those living in small one company towns.
Now UR sits at 25% in the polls. The KPRF are at 10%, which would be enough to deny UR its super-majority. Some of those younger communists have ties to Alexei Navalny. In Moscow and Kazan, and Khabarovsk in 2020, communist lawmakers were among those arrested. This upcoming generation has
no memory of Soviet socialism. The 1990s for many is also
“Truth be told, the KPRF is the only party that has ever come anywhere close to a real opposition party. Unlike most parties, systematic or liberal, it has a longstanding history pre-dating the Russian Federation”
a distant memory and the economic woes of today pale in comparison to 1998, 1993, perestroika or even the 1950s. They do, however, reflect much bigger trends among Russia’s youth.
In one survey of Russian youths’ political views, social democracy was the favoured political ideology (28%); those identifying as ‘Russian nationalists’ came in second (19%), followed by communists (11%) and liberals (12%). Moreover, research carried out by CEPA also revealed that the young were much less paternalistic, civic engagement was low, and had lower expectations of support from the state (CEPA, 2020). Only 27% of younger respondents said that they could not live without state support, opposed to 70% among older age groups. Support for Putin was also dropping, which can be put down to wider sources of information, openness to the world and knowledge of foreign languages.