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The new
pro-Kremlin bloc was to be led by Sergei Shoigu, the respected
emergencies minister. Because of the nature of his job of
supervising disaster relief operations during earthquakes, floods,
fires, and so on, Shoigu was often in the news and had earned a
reputation as an effective and no-nonsense “disaster manager.” His
election bloc was backed by the new prime minister, Putin, who also
showed himself from the start to be a tough administrator, capable
of taking responsibility for risky actions, including military
operations in Dagestan to repel the incursions of Chechen armed
groups and then in Chechnya itself. |
Thus, the
regional bureaucracy, united under the umbrella of the
Fatherland—All Russia bloc, suddenly found itself confronted by a
powerful regions-based contender, which was competing on the same
segment of the electoral field and had the public endorsement of the
popular prime minister to boot.
All in all,
twenty-six electoral coalitions and blocs took part in the 1999
election campaign. However, only six of them had any real chance of
passing the 5 percent hurdle needed to enter the Duma: the
Communist Party, Fatherland—All Russia, the Unity bloc, Yabloko, the
Union of Right Forces, and Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalists. Out of
these leading six, only the Communists seemed to be assured of the
stable support of their electorate, which traditionally voted for
them out of nostalgia for the times of Brezhnev’s “stagnation” and
the long-gone certainties of the Soviet era.
The rest had
to fight for votes in fierce competition with other contestants
occupying similar ideological and political niches: the Unity bloc
pitted against Fatherland—All Russia, the Union of Right Forces
against Yabloko, and Zhirinovsky’s “liberal democrats” against a
number of smaller ultraradical groupings. The result of this
uncompromising struggle, which took the form of a venomous
“information war” waged in the national media, saw the “outsiders” –
the Unity bloc, the Union of Right Forces, and the Zhirinovsky bloc
– begin to press the favorites – Fatherland—All Russia and Yabloko.
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