Moscow Times

December 11, 1998

EDITORIAL: Right Center Has Platform But Little Else

The founding congress of the new right-centrist party has been accompanied by much posturing, but its influence in the next few years is likely to be very limited.

The party will have one advantage over almost all others, except the communists: It has a clear ideology.

The party is unabashedly committed to economic liberalism, smaller government, free markets, private enterprise and integration into the world economy.

This would have placed it on the right wing of politics in the West a decade ago, but in the United States and Britain, at least, these ideas have become the common currency of both left and right.

The movement is also committed to most of the political ideals of liberalism. It stresses defense of human rights, rejects aggressive nationalism and militarism and accepts the independence of the former Soviet republics. It sheds no tears for the demise of the Soviet Union as a Great Power.

To those in the West, this may sound like a fairly rational, coherent platform. Unfortunately, the West is likely to remain this party's most loyal constituency.

The biggest problem facing the new party is that for better or worse the public largely blames some of its leaders for the economic hardships of the past six years. Yegor Gaidar is regarded as the author of "shock therapy" and Anatoly Chubais bears the stain of Russia's privatization program. Sergei Kiriyenko, if indeed he joins the bloc, is tainted by the events of Aug. 17.

Many of these criticisms may be unjustified. Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov's supposedly leftist government is now being forced to adopt many of the policies that these hated liberals have been trying to implement for years.

But the mass of Russians will view the right centrists as a bunch of smart-assed, corrupt intellectuals in the pockets of Western business. In fact, this has always been true, even in 1992. Throughout their reforms, Gaidar and Chubais always had a core constituency of one person: President Boris Yeltsin. Now that Yeltsin is weak, and even more so once Yeltsin leaves the political scene entirely, Pravoye Delo will be isolated.

Still, the bloc is necessary and should not be written off completely. Despite ridiculous fragmentation among his democratic and right-wing allies, Gaidar's Russia's Choice party came close to crossing the 5 percent barrier needed to enter the State Duma in the 1995 elections.With the right leader -- Kiriyenko or Nemtsov, perhaps -- Pravoye Delo could succeed this time. That would be a useful, if by no means crucial, voice in Russian politics. Anything is better than the communists.