At the climax of the election campaign, United Russia leader Dmitry Medvedev gave a programmatic interview to Vedomosti. By the usual rules of political technology, an appearance by the party chairman is meant to be one of the campaign’s set-piece moments. In theory it should have distilled the program into a few memorable lines that the rest of the media could pick up and repeat. Texts of that kind are normally placed in mass-circulation tabloids or on television. A business paper with a relatively narrow readership is a poor vehicle for the job: the ordinary voter is almost certain never to hear of the interview at all.
The interview itself is plainly not aimed at a mass audience. The questions and answers are written in heavy bureaucratic prose, diluted with swearing and the stock phrases of Soviet newspapers. Medvedev talks at length about the judiciary — Russian and foreign — about drones, artificial intelligence, the war and the international agenda. In other words, about subjects that interest a broad public very little. Some of the reasoning might even alienate a society already tired of the war.
“If we do not press the conflict to a close on our terms, it will be revived. Our adversaries will continue to undermine the foundations of our country and, given any opportunity, will try to carve it into pieces,” Medvedev says of the war’s prospects. The implication is that it will not end soon.
The problems that actually matter now — rising prices, the petrol shortage, the difficulties facing business — and still less any remedies for them, Medvedev does not mention at all. In an ordinary election campaign such a performance would be written off as a failure. Not in the Russia of these elections.
The political bloc of the Presidential Administration is trying not to draw extra attention to the campaign, so that those who turn up at the polls are mainly loyal voters or people dependent on the authorities. The front man for United Russia is Vladimir Putin; Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin has been given the separate “therapeutic” storylines. Medvedev, who this year again failed to secure a place on the party list and a passage into the State Duma, has nothing to do with United Russia’s agitation. The Vedomosti interview is his own campaign, addressed first of all to Vladimir Putin.
Medvedev constantly cites the president, and in his telling the party acts on the initiative or instructions of the head of state, whom he calls the “supreme commander-in-chief.” All of this is meant to please the president above anyone else. Medvedev is demonstrating that he observes the chain of command to the letter and has long since stopped claiming the role of “number one,” even inside his own party. Many passages in the interview read like lines Putin himself would like to hear.
“We should not be shy about acting against those countries that have subjected our country to collective or individual unlawful restrictions. Our aim should be to inflict maximum property and financial damage on hostile states. And here all means are good,” Medvedev proposes.
He offers the president a pleasing prophecy: “The ICC will soon die” (the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023). The extended reflections on how the courts work are likewise aimed more at the head of state than at anyone else.
With this interview the leader of United Russia and former president is trying to speak to Vladimir Putin on the eve of the personnel changes that are likely to follow the Duma elections. Once again Medvedev is displaying loyalty and pointing to a brief where he might still be of use. The post of deputy secretary of the Security Council, with its vague powers, has long weighed on him. Against that background there has been talk for some time of a move into the chair of the Constitutional Court, now occupied by the 83-year-old Valery Zorkin.
Rumors earlier circulated in public about a possible appointment to the Supreme Court, but that path closed after former prosecutor general Igor Krasnov was sent there. It is quite likely that Medvedev is trying to stop the same scenario from repeating itself at the Constitutional Court.
The battle of the pollsters
As the State Duma elections draw closer, the gap between the two main loyal pollsters — FOM and VTsIOM — has become even more pronounced. The centers have swapped the roles of good cop and bad cop when it comes to the ratings of the president and United Russia.
In the spring VTsIOM recorded a steady decline in the figures for Putin and the ruling party — so obvious that the methodology eventually had to be changed in order to correct the numbers. FOM, in the same period, painted a far more optimistic picture. Now, according to VTsIOM, Putin’s approval and trust ratings are edging up. So is United Russia, whose support stands at 37.4 percent (+0.2 percentage points over the past week). FOM, by contrast, shows that the party has still not climbed out of its August slump: support then fell from 37 percent to 33 percent and has not recovered. Approval of the president’s work, on FOM’s figures, is also slipping slightly.
The centers diverge even more sharply on support for the systemic parliamentary parties. FOM gives the KPRF and the LDPR 10 percent each, New People 5 percent and A Just Russia 4 percent. A week ago, the Liberal Democrats’ rating jumped, for no obvious reason, by 4 percentage points — loyal party consultants attribute this to the activity of LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky. It is enough, however, to watch his appearances and campaign clips — Slutsky looks neither at the camera nor at his interlocutors and speaks in the voice of a robot from a 1960s film — to see that this explanation has little to do with reality. FOM also records a small gain of 1 percentage point for A Just Russia. That, too, is hard to explain: party leader Sergei Mironov has, because of illness or injury, effectively dropped out of the campaign, which by any normal logic should have weakened the party rather than strengthened it. New People, according to FOM, have lost 3 percentage points since the beginning of August and now stand at 5 percent. That drop is equally difficult to justify: the party is running the same rather blurry campaign as before, which has become neither markedly stronger nor markedly weaker.
VTsIOM, by contrast, is more generous to New People, giving them 10.4 percent and second place behind the KPRF (13.1 percent), against 9.9 percent for the LDPR. Even on this center’s figures, however, the New People rating is slipping slightly while the LDPR is rising a little. There may be several explanations for the anomaly.
First, a “battle of the ratings” may be useful to the Presidential Administration simply as a way of entertaining an audience that is, in principle, always interested in politics — and on whom the usual techniques for “drying out” turnout do not work. Watching the ratings move, whether those movements are real or manufactured, the engaged voter is left with the impression that something is happening in the campaign and that second and third place have not yet been decided. Second, political managers can use loyal polling outfits to soothe the leaders of the systemic parties — Leonid Slutsky and Alexei Nechaev — who still harbor ambitions of doing better than they did last time. Third, the centers can work with the parties and reweigh survey results until the numbers satisfy the client.
In all three cases the manipulations are obvious. This “battle of the pollsters” lays bare the artificiality of the political process itself — and of the State Duma campaign.
