Most of last Friday, like much of the last month, had been a raucous day in Russia’s lower house of parliament. Federal deputies hurled insults and traded threats as they informally counted votes and relished the drama of the Duma’s impending decision either to confirm Sergei Kiriyenko as prime minister or be disbanded.
Then, suddenly, it was over. Kiriyenko skated through. The Duma building soon emptied, and the shouting in the halls gave way to the soft sound of straw brooms on marble floors.
The episode offered fresh evidence that while the Duma can block President Boris Yeltsin and his government in various ways, holding up legislation and dominating the headlines, it cannot exert its will to get things done, at least on issues Russians consider significant. In part by constitutional design, in part through the failings of the deputies themselves, the Duma is a weak institution that commands little respect.
If Russia’s march toward democracy has been slow and winding, observers and federal legislators say, some of the blame rests on the imbalances of its parliamentary system. Those imbalances were never made more clear than over the past month.
Many of the 450 deputies did not want Kiriyenko under any circumstances. Others demanded that the 35-year-old technocrat from Nizhny Novgorod appoint members of the opposition to his Cabinet.
Yet Kiriyenko is now in office, the third prime minister in post-Soviet Russia, putting together a government led by reform-minded figures the opposition cannot bear.
Kiriyenko tapped Boris Nemtsov as a deputy prime minister in charge of Russia’s key oil and gas industries. Viktor Khristenko, who like Kiriyenko and Nemtsov is young, market-oriented and from Russia’s regions, will be another deputy prime minister. Mikhail Zadornov stays on as finance minister.
Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov and defense chief Igor Sergeyev, with whom the opposition is comfortable, will return.
The Duma, meanwhile, can do little except sit back, nurse its wounds and watch.
“They might try something in October, a no-confidence vote or something like that,” a Kremlin official said. “But the summer will be very quiet. I guarantee it.”
Russia’s constitution gives the president almost royal powers. The Kremlin initiates most legislation, for example. The Duma must approve the budget, but spending decisions rest almost exclusively with the Finance Ministry. The Duma has no power to confirm or reject Cabinet appointees, and its sway over the prime minister’s post, as the Kiriyenko battle showed, is severely limited.
The Duma, according to the constitution, can reject the president’s choice twice without penalty. But the Kremlin is not bound by these rejections, and a third Duma refusal, either of the original candidate or another, requires the automatic dissolution of the lower house and scheduling of new elections.
It was that dead end that deputies chose to avoid on Friday.
“The Russian parliament has practically no control functions,” said political analyst Ludmilla Telen. “The opportunity to choose the prime minister is the only chance for the parliament to influence the government, and even here the president can twist their arms.
“The structure of the parliamentary system has been inefficient from the very beginning; it’s inherent in the constitution.”
Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center agreed: “A weak parliament is always an irresponsible parliament.”
Others, however, do not absolve the deputies of blame.
The Communists, the Duma’s largest faction, struggle with internal divisions: Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov plays the moderate’s role while a handful of firebrands demand a more ideological, confrontational challenge to Yeltsin.
Alliances among parliamentary groups are an even stickier business. The rancor among the Communist and Yabloko factions and that of rightist Vladimir Zhirinovsky was on full display during the Kiriyenko debate. Charges flew of factions selling out to the Kremlin or even foreign governments, and Zhirinovsky threatened one rival with “a punch in your ugly mug.”
“The opposition knows what it doesn’t like and doesn’t want, and it can often coalesce against policies and personnel,” a Western diplomat said. “But it has trouble getting itself together for positive programs.”
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, one of Kiriyenko’s arch foes from the private sector, billionaire Boris Berezovsky, was named executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose and largely ineffectual grouping of 12 of the 15 former Soviet republics.
Berezovsky insisted Wednesday that he took the post to try to improve cooperation between the states, but critics suggested he wanted to use the position–and the high-level connections it provides–to advance his business interests.
Time is what the Duma bought itself with its pro-Kiriyenko vote last week. But what the Communists and other Kremlin foes long for are elections that would give them enough seats to rewrite the constitution.
Most analysts consider that goal optimistic, and besides, the next parliamentary elections are not scheduled until the end of 1999.
Until then, Russia probably will have to live with the system, and the Duma, it has now.
“All these shuffles will not change the picture,” Shevtsova said. “The problem is not the government. The problem is not even the permanently ailing president. The problem is the system itself, which has no independent institutions and will be permanently rocked by succession crises.”
