State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin, commenting on gossip about the possible dissolution of the government, has noted that the issue was not considered in April, when the Cabinet delivered its annual performance report to the lower house.
Journalists asked Naryshkin on Thursday if there were “objective
reasons” to change the Russian government given that such a
scenario has lately been widely speculated on the media.
“I’d like to remind you that very recently [on April 17], the
State Duma was hearing the government’s report on the results of
their work in 2012. The deputies did not raise the issue of [the
Cabinet’s] dissolution,” he observed.
When the journalists noted that the answer was hardly clear, the
Duma chairman recommended that they “read between the
lines.”
Last month, after Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev presented the
government record, his Cabinet’s performance came under bitter
criticism from the opposition factions.
In particular, senior Communist party member, Ivan Melnikov
demanded that Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov be
fired. He added that the Communists were skeptical
about Medvedev’s speech “because the Cabinet has entrenched itself
in the stockpiles of papers and has drowned in figures,” cited
Itar-Tass.
Fair Russia’s Nikolay Levichev stated that if the country
returned to recession, they may put forward a vote of no-confidence
in the government.
United Russia Party — chaired by Medvedev — also voiced its
concerns over the decrease of small and medium sized businesses in
the country.
Besides that, the ruling party’s MPs were dissatisfied with the
coordination of work between the lawmakers and the government.
Responding to criticism, Medvedev noted that
there are posts in the government that always come under fire, but
ministers are not coins to be liked by everyone and they will not
be fired.
President Vladimir Putin, though, took a favorable view of the
report, his press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
On May 7, Putin held a meeting on the execution of his orders
signed on the day of his inauguration a year before. In these
landmark decrees — that outlined key directions of Russia’s
development in near future — he sought to fulfil his presidential
campaign promises.
Putin admitted that some “results have been achieved” in a year
since he returned to the Kremlin. But then he poured cold water on
the ministers blasting them for poor implementation of his decrees.
He promised he would judge the effectiveness of the government by
the improvement in people’s lives and not by paper reports.
Following that speech, Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov —
once known as the architect of the so-called Russian sovereign
democracy — refused to read his report on the fulfilment of Putin’s
orders. He admitted that president’s criticism was fair. The
following day Surkov resigned.
On May 23, President Putin gave Medvedev till June 7 to work out
a plan of government activities for the next five years aimed at
the fulfilment of his May 7, 2012 orders. He also told the prime
minister to implement measures to increase the transparency of
government and to make public the results of new legislation, the
Kremlin press service reported.
According to political analyst Aleksandr Kynev, drafting such a
plan for government is similar to “scheduling their own
dismissals,” he told Kommersant daily. In his view, Putin’s
decrees are quite difficult to implement.
This article originally appeared on: RT