Medvedev's Non-Announcement: A Case of Virtual Politics?

On the day Medvedev demurred from announcing his candidature in the next elections, St Petersburg’s duma recalled Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov from serving in the upper house of parliament.

Mironov had been the leader of Just Russia, a Kremlin created vehicle to appeal to the patriotic centre-left vote.  But when he announced that the party would no longer be supporting Putin’s candidacy, its own members turned against him.

The event is very important because, as Russia’s third largest party, Just Russia was Medvedev’s big hope for backing in any race against Putin. What’s more, as Ben Aris writes, an independent Just Russia party led by a Medvedev ally could have prevented Putin’s United Russia from amassing the super-majority needed to be able to alter the constitution.

But now that Mironov, Just Russia’s charismatic leader, has been defused,  the party is no longer likely to make the 7% threshold to win seats in the Duma: paving the way for a Putin supermajority.

However, just as he was abandoned by JR, Medvedev ostensibly got another chance at a backer, in the shape of oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. The secretive NJ Jets owner, who became Russia’s third richest man from an aluminium empire acquired during the shady 90s,  has just agreed to head the only party publicly backing Medvedev: the Right Cause. Right Cause is a small amalgamation of Nemtsov’s old Union of Right Forces and a few other tiny liberal-right grouping. However, Prokhorov’s prodigious wealth could potentially increase its political impact.

Why only potentially? Prokhorov is no liberal firebrand. The  elusive man with an international reputation as a playboy would have been more likely to throw a party than head one.

Moreover, as the first oligarch since Khodorkovsky to formally join politics, Prokhorov knows perfectly well how that can turn out: Prudently keeping his head well below the parapet is what allowed him to remain one of the last of the ‘first generation oligarchs’ still standing. His loyalty to Putin was rewarded with a state medal, and he is said to be much more interested in women than politics.

True, he has supported liberal causes, such as financing a highbrow literary-political magazine called Snob, which targets wealthy international Russians. But while it sometimes publishes viewpoints critical of the government (including a controversial interview with Gorbachev), the $10 an issue magazine remains unknown among ordinary Russians. He is friends with the publisher of the liberal business newspaper Kommersant; but the paper, which while being politically independent, is no Novaya Gazeta.

In short, Prokhorov is the perfect partner to Medvedev as he is now: the safe liberal, modernising, cosmopolitan and middle-class foil to the more populist Putin. This Medvedev has different priorities but the same outlooks as Putin, and is bolstered by the same interest groups: oligarchs like Prokhorov and Abramovich are also Putin’s backbone.

Likewise, Prokhorov would be extremely unlikely to support a Medvedev who might seek a genuine rupture of the tandem and advance an agenda independent of Putin and the cozy web of domestic industrialists and foreign big business. Short of being a secret revolutionary, Prokhorov would  never have risked his billions and possibly even his freedom, if that was even a remote possibility.

Therefore, the fact that Prokhorov has decided to back Medvedev suggests that Medvedev is not actually in conflict with Putin, and is not seeking a truly independent agenda.  Despite some rifts round the edges, the ‘crisis of the tandem’ may well be another case of Russia’s well-worn ‘virtual politics’.

Increasingly, we are seeing the realisation of Vladimir Frolov’s scenario: supermajority in his pocket, Putin remains in charge even if an eviscerated Medvedev, supported by a loyal oligarch like Prohorov, remains President for another term.

Will Medvedev run in 2012? It doesn’t matter.