Russian Pundits Blame Lack Of Clear Agenda For Wane In Protest Movement

File Photo of Moscow Winter Protest

(RIA Novosti – Dec. 17, 2012) The decision of the Russian opposition Coordination Council to hold off on mass rallies until spring 2013 is a sensible one in view of the wane in protest activity, political analysts told state-owned news agency RIA Novosti on 17 December.

Meanwhile, the managing director of the independent Levada Centre pollster, Lev Gudkov, predicted a spike in protest activity around February-March 2013, privately-owned Interfax news agency reported on the same day.

Protest moods persist, protest activity waning

The latest protest, an unauthorized assembly in central Moscow on 15 December, saw a relatively low turnout (between 500 and 5000 people, by different estimates), with some 40 people detained.

Pundit Mikhail Remizov told RIA that “protest sentiments have not gone anywhere, but the protest movement has almost fully expired,” he added.

“Rather, it has returned to the original form in which it existed before the rise in activity in December 2011: when there is a circle of professional activists, for whom political life is about organizing protest rallies. And these are generally not rallies focused on specific issues, but are protests against the political system as a whole, and the rules of the game that prevail,” he said.

Remizov went on to say that a new burst of activity would likely transpire outside the boundaries of the current protest movement. “It is difficult to say what could trigger that. We can expect, I think, some socio-economic themes,” he said.

Expert Dmitriy Badovskiy attributed the decline in protest activity to the absence of a compelling agenda that could appeal to the urban middle class.

“The protest movement formula that has emerged in late 2011 – early 2012 has run dry. And it is obvious that the leaders of the protest movement are starting to realize they will need to move towards systematic and institutional political work – building a party and drawing up election strategies. Otherwise they will fall behind other political forces and find themselves in de facto isolation, ” Badovskiy said. He added that he expects to see “an attempt to recharge” mass rallies in spring, questioning whether protest leaders would be able to come up with a meaningful political agenda by then.

“Leftist factions inside the protest movement will try to pull the social protest to their side. There is rather fierce political competition in the left wing, and the leftist part of the protest movement has a difficult relationship with and different political positions to liberal leaders,” he noted.

Analyst Pavel Svyatenkov also attributed the wane in protester to poor leadership and the absence of a substantive political programme.

“If at first the rallies had articulate demands – for early elections – demands later shrunk into the shadows, and now, to be frank, there is no real clarity about what the opposition really wants. No real demands that could grab the minds of the public were voiced at the Lubyanka protest (on 15 December). The basic challenge here is to formulate a meaningful programme and to put forward a meaningful leader,” Svyatenkov said.

According to him, a new burst of protest activity is quite possible in spring as “people are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the authorities”. Nevertheless, he said that new “adequate forms of protest”, with a new set of demands are required for the authorities to respond to the protests.

Cold weather, old agenda

For his part, pundit Dmitriy Abzalov told RIA Novosti that the relatively low turnout at the 15 September and 15 December protests proved to organizers that people have grown tire of protests.

“Both the authorized and unauthorized formats showed that there is generally quite a small number of participants, and getting people out in the street in either format during winter time will be very difficult,” he said.

He also said that the holiday festivities and cold weather would make attracting large numbers rather difficult. Moreover, he added that “if there is nothing radically new on the agenda, I doubt then that (organizers) can count on mass turnout”.

Long-term challenges for opposition

Speaking about the protest movement at a news agency at Interfax, Levada Centre’s Gudkov predicted a rise in protest activity in a couple of months time, but pointed out the long-term challenges before the opposition movement.

“February and March are usually the dreariest months. We will get a sharp rise in protest sentiments,” Gudkov said. Gudkov dismissed the notion that “the reasons for social dissatisfaction have disappeared”. “They persist,” he noted.

“Russians believe that the protest movement’s weakness is a lack of clear agenda and plan of action. Movement coordinators and organizers are not able to put forward articulate agendas,” he explained. “There is nothing to mobilize people, even though there is huge potential for social dissatisfaction,” he added.

Gudkov saw little prospect for the opposition movement to have any real political impact in the short term. “It is quite unlikely that there will be major changes in the next 10-15 years,” he predicted, noting that “there are neither intellectual nor organizational resources to channel the protest movement into the work of parties in the near future”.

“I think the protest will grow by the next electoral cycle, and the opposition will show itself as a real force, though it is unlikely to be able to change the situation,” he said. “Compared to the Kremlin, the opposition is far less organized. The Kremlin has sufficient resources as regards logistics, propaganda, information and finances,” he said, summarizing the challenges that the opposition movement is facing.

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