Rigging constitutions runs in the family

[russian33]

If anyone should know how to rig a constitution, it’s me and George Bush, Jr. You might say it runs in the family.

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A decade of good works later, and I happened to be in Athens the year US President Ronald Reagan thought it was time to rig a Greek election, and dispose of socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. He was much too popular at the time to lose a constitutional election, and as Reagan’s advisors warned, they had already toyed far too often with the Greek constitution for another attempt to be worth the try. And so the idea was hatched to encourage a little war between Turkey and Greece over oil exploration rights on the seabed of the Aegean Sea. The plan was to humiliate Papandreou in front of the voters. The Greeks started preparing for war about six months before Washington told the Turkish prime minister to give the order to set sail into Greek waters.

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When the Moscow Times reported this week that President Vladimir Putin is proposing to change the Russian Constitution “which was drafted by Yeltsin advisers amid political fights in a Communist-controlled Duma”, the audacity of the misrepresentation, or the forgetfulness, takes one’s breath away.

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The Moscow Times compounds its forgetfulness of what really happened with more distortion. The Yeltsin constitution of 1993, claims the newspaper, “placed a lot of power in the president’s hands but introduced direct elections for governors, and reserved half of the seats in the Duma to directly elected deputies.” What is omitted is that Yeltsin eliminated direct election of senators to the Federation Council, substituting the governors and the regional parliament chairmen in their place. This was done because direct election of the upper house had created an anti-Yeltsin majority during the constitutional battle with the Supreme Soviet.

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That sordid story does not justify the attacks on Putin’s proposals from the same forgetful gang that backed Yeltsin’s destruction of parliament, court, and constitution 11 years ago. Eleven years for a rigged constitution has proved long enough to forget the democratic options that Yeltsin destroyed.

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Gubernatorial seats are so expensive, they have required oligarch-sized fortunes to acquire. Thus, for example, Sibneft owns Chukotka; Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk; Alrosa, Sakha; Russian Aluminium, Samara and Khakassia; and Tyumen Oil Company, Tyumen. It has been cheaper to buy seats in the Federation Council, and the State Duma. It’s difficult to say whether single-mandate seats in the lower chamber are more costly, more tradable than places on the party lists. Both together represent a concentration of corporate wealth that has been the real character of Russia’s parliamentary evolution since 1993.

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The big question today is whether Putin will prove strong enough to continue his campaign against the oligarchs, and clean parliament of their corruption at the same time.

http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=45590


A little different point a view to all the 'Putin is killing democracy' concerns.