At a congress in Moscow over a thousand Communist deputies from the federal and regional level have been trying to develop a strategy that would allow them increased political weight.
Party leader, Gennadiy Zyuganov, told his colleagues that the
current situation is Russia was ‘favorable’ — even though the
authorities managed to tone down the active protests, the number
of people who support United Russia is on the
decrease. Zyuganov quoted the latest opinion polls that show only
24 percent of voters said they were supporting the present
majority party and only 29 percent said they were supporting
Vladimir Putin — a marked fall from 2012 when the share of those
who supported Putin was over 63 percent
Zyuganov then added that the Communist parliamentarians must be
more on the September 8 election day so they overcome voter
negativity and get the representation they deserve. At the moment
Communists hold slightly over 8,000 seats in federal and regional
parliaments — a very small share of a total of over 221,000
seats.
The Communist leader gave a typical outline of the major
drawbacks of modern capitalism, offering his party faithful a set
of ready-made arguments for future election debates.
Zyuganov described the current situation in the world as the
collapse of the existing financial system and a vivid proof that
capitalism cannot solve the problems that it had created. He
accused Russian and international oligarchs of “robbing Russia
and its people”, capital flight, dominance of resource sector
in the economy and poor state of society.
The communist head said that “almost all major Russian
companies” now belong to foreign investors who extract the
profits, saving on taxes, social programs and also on the
modernization of production facilities. He also said the current
fall in production growth and dire state of many of Russian
regions “have proved that the reforms, planned and conducted
by the current Russian authorities, had failed completely”.
Despite their leader’s calls, some of the top members of the
party remained skeptical about their chances in the September
polls. State Duma member Vadim Potomskiy and parliamentary of the
Vladimir Region Lyudmila Bunina both said in comments to
Kommersand daily that the support from the President and federal
ministries gave great advantage to United Russia candidates and
no strategy could overweight this.
Some regional politicians, on the contrary, said that they
believed that their results will be better than those of previous
elections. Communist party members from Buryatia, Ryazan and
Kalmykia, said that their representation in regional parliaments
will grow after the September polls.
Kommersant’s experts took a medium position, saying that
communists might repeat or slightly improve their representation
in regional legislatures, but had very little chances at
gubernatorial polls.
This article originally appeared on: RT