Common People Hate Politicians

Politicians’ major enemy is the voters, who do not believe their promises

The Russian State Duma gave the third final reading to the new variant of the law pertaining to the elections of the State Duma deputies of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. The law was approved on Wednesday, at the plenary session of the Russian parliament.

The law stipulates the voting limit of seven percent for political parties and election blocs. This limit is fixed for State Duma elections. In addition to that, a deputy’s election fund is increased too. Now a deputy’s fund will make up six million rubles. A fund of an election bloc is now increased to 250 million rubles.

The new limit will accelerate the process of making large gamblers on the political arena of Russia. Those, who will not be able to cover that limit, will reach out for political monsters, like Unified Russia or the Communist Party of Russia. However, all those things are not going to happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. The new law will come into effect only in five years. Small parties have some time to relax now.

Five years is a very long period for a country, in which things change so quickly. A lot of those people, who voted for this law, will leave the State Duma in the year 2003. Only a few parties managed to overcome the voting limit of five percent during the latest elections to the Russian parliament in 1999. It is really interesting to know, what is going to happen, when the seven-percent-limit is instituted.

Politicians’ major enemy is the people, who go to the polls to elect them. To be more precise – the people, who do not believe their promises and those individuals, who express their attitude to politics by not going to the polls at all. The newspaper Izvestia has recently published interesting facts on the subject.

Since 1996, Harris Poll company has been changing its alienation index for the adult population of the United States of America. This index of alienation is based on people’s answers to five questions.  Those questions and answers allow to find out, to which extent people are alienated from the society, in which they live, from its governing bodies. This index fluctuated between 56 and 62 on the scale of zero to one hundred (the higher the figure, the stronger the alienation). The Russian Public Opinion Center used Harris Poll’s experienced and asked those questions to Russian respondents last year. As a result, it became known that the index of Russian people’s alienation  made up 78%. This was 16% as much in comparison with the USA. The difference between Russia and the USA is especially large, when it comes to the mass perception of authorities. The biggest kind of alienation in Russia is the alienation from the government.  This index is 28% as higher as in the States.

Let’s leave the percentage alone and turn to ethics. Everybody knows about Vladimir Zhirinovsky's unethical behavior. However, very few people are aware of Lubov Sliska’s ethic norms (vice speaker of the Russian parliament). The State Duma has recently entrusted the parliamentary committee for ethics to investigate the validity of accusations against Lubov Sliska. She allegedly releases insulting statements against other deputies and even voters. This instruction was given to the committee in Lubov Sliska’s absence from the session. She is currently in Istanbul, chairing the Russian delegation that takes part in the autumn session of the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO. As it is expected, she is coming back to Moscow tonight.

Dmitry Litvinovich
PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov