Russian Communists brace themselves for fighting international oligarchy

At a congress in Moscow over a thousand Communist deputies from the federal and regional level have been trying to develop a strategy that would allow them increased political weight.

Party leader, Gennadiy Zyuganov, told his colleagues that the current situation is Russia was 'favorable' – even though the authorities managed to tone down the active protests, the number of people who support United Russia  is on the decrease. Zyuganov quoted the latest opinion polls that show only 24 percent of voters said they were supporting the present majority party and only 29 percent said they were supporting Vladimir Putin – a marked fall from 2012 when the share of those who supported Putin was over 63 percent

Zyuganov then added that the Communist parliamentarians must be more on the September 8 election day so they overcome voter negativity and get the representation they deserve. At the moment Communists hold slightly over 8,000 seats in federal and regional parliaments – a very small share of a total of over 221,000 seats.

The Communist leader gave a typical outline of the major drawbacks of modern capitalism, offering his party faithful a set of ready-made arguments for future election debates.

Zyuganov described the current situation in the world as the collapse of the existing financial system and a vivid proof that capitalism cannot solve the problems that it had created. He accused Russian and international oligarchs of “robbing Russia and its people”, capital flight, dominance of resource sector in the economy and poor state of society.

The communist head said that “almost all major Russian companies” now belong to foreign investors who extract the profits, saving on taxes, social programs and also on the modernization of production facilities. He also said the current fall in production growth and dire state of many of Russian regions “have proved that the reforms, planned and conducted by the current Russian authorities, had failed completely”.

Despite their leader’s calls, some of the top members of the party remained skeptical about their chances in the September polls. State Duma member Vadim Potomskiy and parliamentary of the Vladimir Region Lyudmila Bunina both said in comments to Kommersand daily that the support from the President and federal ministries gave great advantage to United Russia candidates and no strategy could overweight this.

Some regional politicians, on the contrary, said that they believed that their results will be better than those of previous elections. Communist party members from Buryatia, Ryazan and Kalmykia, said that their representation in regional parliaments will grow after the September polls.

Kommersant’s experts took a medium position, saying that communists might repeat or slightly improve their representation in regional legislatures, but had very little chances at gubernatorial polls.