Russia’s major opposition party – the Communists – held a rally in Moscow demanding President Putin sacks the government over the recent ruble crash and the ‘catastrophic’ budget of 2015.
About 200 people protested near government headquarters at a rally that was officially registered as a meeting between Communist MPs and their voters.
“When the Russian government submitted the draft budget 2015 to the State Duma we, the Communist Party, said this was a budget of disaster. This budget fails to solve any problems,” the deputy leader of the party, MP Valery Rashkin, said during the event.
The lawmaker added that the recent rapid devaluation of the ruble had devastated the average Russian’s wealth, and demanded that President Vladimir Putin dismiss Dmitry Medvedev’s entire government.
The leader of the Communist Party, Gennadiy Zyuganov, on Tuesday called upon heads of all parliamentary parties to discuss the “cabinet problem” with the president, to develop an urgent crisis-reversal plan for the nation.
“If we do not attract such people as those attracted by Stalin to ensure the national security, the likes of Korolev, Keldysh and Kurchatov, it will be impossible to solve even a single problem,” the Interfax news agency quoted Zyuganov as saying. The politician added that in his view there were no people of such caliber in the current Russian government.
The three names mentioned by the head of the Communist Party belong to three scientists, who created Russian missile and nuclear weapons in the 40s and 50s.Mstislav Keldysh was a mathematician, Igor Kurchatov was a nuclear physicist and Sergey Korolyov was a rocket scientist.
Zyuganov also told reporters that some government ministers were doing very well, in particular the defense minister and the interior minister. “But if you have a broader look at their budget policy, at the finance and economy bloc, at the agriculture and social blocs – there we can only see a complete disaster,” the Communist leader said.
Speaking at a major press conference last week, President Putin said that both the government and the Central Bank were dealing adequately with the modern challenges to the Russian economy. He noted, however, that there were some questions regarding the quality and timing of the actions, but insisted that the general strategy was correct.
Putin also said the current situation in the economy was caused by external factors and noted that he expected things to get back to normal in a maximum of two years.