Try being constructive: When protesters on municipal councils ‘get in the way’ of democracy

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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – Anna Arutunyan is the politics editor of The Moscow News – Dec. 17, 2012)

I should say something about the latest anti-government protest ­ how about 2,000 people showed up to the first white-ribbon demonstration that failed to get City Hall authorization, but… snore. The rallies have disintegrated into a mere tribute to that warm, fuzzy, feeling everyone had during the first rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad one year ago. On Lubyanka this past Saturday, we ran out of things to say.

Instead, I’d like to talk about Katya, a municipal deputy I met just a few hours later. We talked about photography. But when Katya (not her real name, obviously), mentioned that she served on a municipal council in one of Moscow’s districts, my first thought was that she was one of last winter’s influx of protesters who turned to local politics.

As they demonstrated for free and fair elections, many Muscovites decided to run for city council ­ and some, including a journalism student and at least one professional poker player ­ won. Bolotnaya, it seemed, was seeping into the municipal world of street lights repairs, housing projects and how to get your neighbors to pick up poop after their dogs.

“No, I’m not one of those people,” Katya said of the protest-minded influx. “We have those too, but they just get in the way.”

My jaw dropped. Here was a perfect specimen of the White Ribbon contingent ­ urban, educated, energetic, and “active in her community” ­ a phrase that’s yet to be translated into Russian. But not only did she not align herself with the protesters, she sounded annoyed by them.

Nor did she support the Kremlin. As a state employee, she had been asked, like many others, to attend one of several pro-Putin rallies over the winter on a voluntary basis ­ but she refused.

So why wasn’t she reaching any common ground with protest-hopping local councilmen?

Municipal councils are mundane affairs ­ they involve people getting together to find solutions to problems like housing utilities, parking fines, and dog poop. As Katya explained, the new arrivals were doing too much arguing, and too little decision making. They were stalling the process. “They were being destructive.”

It sounded like the people trying to make a point about democracy were getting in the way of people actually practicing it, however flawed their instruments.

I’ve heard this story before, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. About two decades ago, a similar confrontation was playing out between the mayor of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad City Council ­ when the budding, democratic city council began stalling every initiative coming out of City Hall, City Hall found ways to bypass the democratic process.

The deputy mayor, incidentally, went on to become the current president.

Last week, delegates of the opposition’s Coordination Council met several times with City Hall officials ­ and failed to agree on a route for their March of Freedom. Friends who’ve attended each protest rally since they began last year refused to go. The opposition leaders were essentially calling on them to provoke the police ­ which seemed irresponsible at best.

I also have to question the motives of City Hall in refusing to authorize the protest, but if the opposition has proclaimed the government illegitimate, why should the government bother with legitimizing their rallies?

Where the opposition was concerned, I saw it as a deliberate refusal to agree ­ in the name of democracy. But what they did was end the democratic process before they could begin it.

The opposition is back to where it started: marginalized, weak, and without an argument to offer to the strong, nor any willingness to compromise for the sake of a solution.

As for the local councils, I’m only hoping that the protest din won’t drown out voices like those of Katya. I had placed my hopes on the protest-minded young deputies who had joined local councils ­ but I was dismayed by the evident communication failures that Katya described.

Because when the thrill of arguing overshadows the tasks at hand, other, shall we say, more efficient instruments come into play. And the people wielding those instruments have little patience for frivolous things like elections and pluralism.

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