Russian Senators, MP Pour Scorn On Opposition’s Coordination Council

(Interfax – Moscow, 23 October) The opposition’s Coordination Council will not be a viable structure due to the ambitions of its members, Federation Council deputy speaker and member of One Russia (United Russia)’s supreme council Svetlana Orlova thinks.

“The process of preparations for this election (to the Coordination Council) and the way it took place shows that there is no agreement in their ranks, they cannot even agree among themselves on elementary issues, each of them has ambitions, they do not think about Russia, and only think about themselves,” Orlova told Interfax on Tuesday (23 October).

In her opinion, recent developments, including the small size of protests, has shown that the members of the Coordination Council have increasingly fewer supporters. “Although people here criticize the authorities, they realize who makes decisions and when, and people can see everyone’s worth, can see the inside story of the opposition, can see whom they are negotiating with and whom they receive money from – from those who are not friends of Russia, and this kind of behaviour by the opposition is a betrayal of their country and their people,” Orlova said. She said she was sure that the Coordination Council would have an “extremely small KPD (efficiency)”.

Another senator, the chairman of the Federation Council’s Education and Social Policy Committee, Valeriy Ryazanskiy, agreed with her. “This Coordination Council reminds me of a Krylov’s fable in which there is no agreement among friends and everyone is trying to pull (a cart) in a different direction. It is understandable, because there are no clear goals, objectives, tactical approaches, there are no clear staffing approaches to common problems, and most importantly, there is no clear agenda, either strategically or step-by-step, hence all this confusion,” Ryazanskiy told Interfax.

In his opinion, the election process itself simulated “some sort of a democratic process”. “In fact, it is not a democratic process but inability to focus on the main areas and gather different people with various strengths into a single team,” the senator explained.

As an example, he mentioned the People’s Front and its leader, President Vladimir Putin, who, according to Ryazanskiy, has been able to consolidate around him people who are capable of, as he put it, “working at the cutting edge and ensuring success”.

According to the senator, opposition leaders are not capable of everyday routine work aimed at building and consolidation. “Their activities, as we have already seen, is aimed at destruction, and that is their main problem,” Ryazanskiy concluded.

For his part, Ruslan Gattarov, a member of the Federation Council Information Policy Committee, told Interfax that he had closely watched the election to the opposition’s Coordination Council.

“This election cannot be taken seriously because it was like a mock election, not a real one. Generally, the opposition has nothing real: They themselves selected only those voters who suited them. This is not a real competition,” Gattarov explained.

According to him, the election was completely non-transparent and unclear to most people.

“They, the opposition, did not have opponents. There was no competition. It is unclear what these people want, except that they want to come to power, but none of the opposition leaders has explained what they will do next,” the senator stressed.

He thinks that the election was rigged in favour of those who were the main “sponsors of this event”.

“The outcome of this election is that these people are not prepared and do not intend to engage in a fair fight,” the senator thinks.

In his opinion, had the opposition and its leaders been ready to really fight for power, they would have taken part in the 14 October (regional) elections and would have tried to win at least a few seats.

“Today they have the Coordination Council, so, are they going to walk around saying that they are the Coordination Council? But whose Coordination Council are they?” Gattarov noted.

He said that the opposition leaders were “drawing a parallel world for themselves in which they are going to live and compete with themselves, saying that they are in power there, in that world”.

(Passage omitted: background)

(At 0616 gmt Interfax quoted the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, State Duma MP Vladimir Zhirinovskiy as saying that the opposition’s Coordination Council was an “illegitimate” and unconstitutional body and that its members should be jailed.)