In the developed countries, issues of local government are among the most important ones. For an ordinary European, American or Canadian, it is more important who enforces law and order in his neighborhood, how the kindergartens and schools in the vicinity operate than who solves some global issues at his office in the capital. Mayoral elections, elections for village headman or local leaders are more important in such countries than presidential elections. On the other hand, local elections are a serious challenge for parties – for example, the defeat of the Christian Democratic Union in the elections that took place in some regions ofGermanyin May was an important signal for Angela Merkel’s party.
In our country, those elections are usually of secondary importance. Some of the reasons, one could say, are objective – our towns and villages don’t have the independence and the budgets, which may allow people to solve vital issues. And the small sums that are at the mayors’ and village headmen’s disposal are usually dissipated by them with the help of tame councils. There is also the subjective side – party ambitions in our country are perceived more important than local problems; politically active person dreams to become a president, a minister, in the last resort, an MP and not a headman in some village. So, it turns out that the struggle for local government is not political, but clannish – it is a good opportunity for families that have been hostile to each other for decades to have some issues out once again.
But the main reason is that in countries like ours everything is decided by the Chief Executive and certainly, that is the very reason why half of the population sees itself in that very role. This implies the following specificity – it is not important what office you hold, it is important in which circles you are. BBC has recently rewrote a political report, according to which not only the Prime Minister and the head of the Kremlin administration are in Putin’s entourage, but also Sergey Chemezov, the Director-General of Russian Technologies State Corporation, and comparatively less known businessmen Gennady Timchenko and Yuri Kovalchuk. So in case of such a state system, the official hierarchy doesn’t mean anything, the real political and economic weight is decisive. Certainly, people long for that real and not formal power.
The opposition is passive in terms of the upcoming local elections. Besides all the above-mentioned reasons, perhaps, it doesn’t want to waste its resources before the presidential election.
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Aram Abrahamyan
