United Russia held the second stage of its congress and adopted its electoral program. The event was meant to be the culmination of the party’s campaign. Instead, it proved even more perfunctory than the first stage, when the party nominated its candidates.
An electoral program is the foundation of any party’s campaigning — the source of its slogans and appeals. Adopting one a month before polling day, at the end of the active phase of the campaign, is a nonsense in itself. United Russia was forced to delay the decision because the situation in the country — at the front and, above all, in the economy and in people’s daily lives — keeps changing. Putting the program off until August was supposed to allow the party to update it in line with current public concerns. No such updating occurred. The party could have adopted a document of this kind at the first stage of the congress, or a year ago.
The program is not a set of concise theses with clear, concrete promises, slogans and calls to action. It is a bland text more than fifty pages long. Finding it on the party website is difficult; the main pages carry only news items that freely paraphrase selected points in the voice of United Russia candidates. The document itself is laced with propagandistic and ideological passages.
“For a thousand years Russia has repeatedly stood in the path of those who sought world domination. Today the Western elites, who built their ‘order’ on lies, plunder and exploitation, on the incitement of hatred and wars, on the suppression of peoples’ right to an independent path of development, cultural identity and distinctiveness, are once again trying to break us, rob us, split our society, inflict a strategic defeat upon us and fragment the country in order to seize control of our territories and resources. But history teaches one lesson: we cannot be broken!” — that is a passage from the preamble.
The word “victory” appears frequently, yet the military theme is otherwise confined to social support for participants in the invasion of Ukraine and their families, or to support for the defense industry. The rest is a collection of the social promises on which United Russia campaigning has always rested — and rather vague ones at that. This, for instance, is how the party describes coming changes in the labor market: “Structural and technological shifts in the economy, the social sphere and other sectors have altered the character of, and the requirements for, many traditional professions and are already giving rise to new specialties. These changes must become a blessing for citizens, opening new opportunities rather than creating problems. Our task is to guarantee a balanced modernization of the labor market.” What the “changes” will actually consist of, why they will be a “blessing” for Russians, and how United Russia will “guarantee” labor-market modernization is never specified in the lengthy document.
Worse, most of the promises — even development of the regions and municipalities, for example — contradict actual state policy. United Russia declares that residents of every city and settlement “must have the opportunity to receive the education they need, quality medical care, and access to modern cultural institutions.” In the provinces, and even in Moscow, social institutions are being “optimized” and closed; given the growing deficits in the federal and regional budgets, the process is likely to continue and intensify. Set against reality, such pledges look at best like evidence that the party has no desire to engage with the country’s problems, and at worst like mockery of the electorate.
There are few concrete figures. United Russia wants to “additionally equip” at least 180 children’s hospitals and more than 500 children’s clinics in the regions, but the document gives no indication of how a budget already under serious strain is supposed to pay for this. The program also contains absurd claims — among them that Russia has “the world’s fourth-largest economy” — and odd promises such as holding All-Russian Fashion Weeks.
Vladimir Putin is mentioned twice, in the program’s “strong” passages: the preamble and the concluding section. He is described as the “unchanging leader.” That is perhaps the most intelligible campaign point in the entire text: United Russia has received final authorization to present itself as the president’s party.
The genuinely topical issues that supposedly justified postponing the program — the gasoline shortage, economic difficulties, rising prices, the trajectory of the war — never appear. United Russia and the political bloc never dared to touch dangerous subjects. The result is that the “People’s Program” has no connection to the actual situation and is at odds with it. Voters may well conclude that United Russia simply does not know how the country lives. To protect its ratings, the party and its overseers in the political bloc avoid the subject of the war; given Putin’s preoccupation with it, they cannot drop the topic entirely, so they insert references to an abstract “victory” — whether at the front or at the ballot box. The content of the program once again underlines that the party of power has no influence over decisions and is plainly uninformed about what the Kremlin and the government intend to do next.
Military notes from Putin and Medvedev
The vagueness of the program might have been offset by brief, pointed pledges from Vladimir Putin, who attended the second stage of the congress and afterwards gave an interview to his court journalist Pavel Zarubin. Such remarks could easily have been assembled into a short “Putin program” for United Russia. Instead, both in his congress speech and in the conversation with Zarubin, the president concentrated on military themes.
“The duty of the party, the duty of United Russia, is to do everything for Victory. Among your candidates there are quite a few veterans of the special military operation; I see them in the hall. Our Heroes fought with dignity for Russia and, I am confident, will work with dignity in the country’s parliament. They have invaluable experience behind them and a deep understanding of the problems faced by those at the front and their families. I am convinced they will devote all their efforts to solving those problems,” Putin said at the congress, ending with the words “Victory will be ours.”
In the interview with Zarubin the president focused on the confrontation with Ukraine, speaking of escalation, new strikes, and certain “unacceptable proposals” for negotiations.
United Russia’s formal leader and former president, Dmitry Medvedev, added further military coloring to Putin’s exhortations. The most striking and widely quoted moment of his congress speech was his description of Ukraine as a “404 country,” together with threats directed at Western states.
In a poll conducted before the congress, the Kremlin-aligned FOM recorded another drop in the ruling party’s ratings. For some time the party and the presidential administration had hinted at a “therapeutic effect” from United Russia’s campaign, which was supposed to soothe a society exhausted by war and hardship. In the event, the party’s agitation — direct and indirect — only deepens fatigue and anxiety.
The cleanup continues
After Yabloko’s federal list was struck from the State Duma election, the party’s candidates began to be removed from regional races as well — first of all in regions with strong local organizations or a tradition of protest voting. Courts, acting on lawsuits from various systemic parties, cancelled Yabloko’s registration for the Pskov regional parliament. Similar suits have already been filed in Sverdlovsk and Kaliningrad oblasts.
The Pskov branch was built by the formidable local politician Lev Shlosberg (sentenced to eleven years for “fakes about the army”), under whose leadership local Yabloko members won seats not only in the regional assembly but in municipalities deep in the provinces. Kaliningrad and Sverdlovsk oblasts are known for their protest traditions.
The authorities are plainly closing off every remaining chance for Yabloko to get a list into even one regional parliament and thereby obtain the privilege that exempts a party from collecting signatures to nominate candidates to the State Duma. It was precisely that privilege that allowed the Central Election Commission to register Yabloko’s federal list in the first place. The Kremlin, under pressure from the security services, is pushing Yabloko out of systemic politics. It is not hiding its intentions, and it is moving as fast as it can.
