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As many observers predicted, Kiriyenko's in. By a landslide, actually.
This vote was by secret ballot, with predictable results: many deputies probably broke ranks with their party chiefs. The Communist and Yabloko parties declared that they were boycotting the votes. It is believed the Yabloko deputies actually did cooperate in this, but many Communist deputies probably voted for Kiriyenko in defiance of their chiefs. (By the way, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats supported Kiriyenko after all. Wonders will never cease...) Whatever the new immediate policy line, one thing is now clear: President Boris Yeltsin is numero uno in Moscow. The head honcho. The kingpin. The Big Boss. Where The Buck Stops. The Russian president has shown he can make the Duma swallow more or less anything. He got the Duma to accept the 1998 budget after weeks of wrangling. He matched the Duma rant for rant and World War III threat for World War III threat during the Iraq crisis. Now, he has foisted on them - and the country - a premier who, while charming and upstanding enough, was still nonexistent in Kremlin terms six months ago. The terms of political conflict have apparently changed very much in Moscow over the course of this year. Yeltsin has shown he can get pretty much anything he wants if he fights hard enough for it. I suspect that was his whole objective in this affair - to show who was boss. Of course, the threat of new Duma elections would have been much more courageous in a parliamentary system (like in Canada, the UK and Germany), from a chief executive necessarily himself a candidate in those elections and dependent for his office on enough of his allies winning as well. Whereas the Russian president is independently elected, and that office wouldn't have been up for election if the Duma had rejected Kiriyenko a third time. But this is no good. See my previous pieces for more details, but I will say for now that Yeltsin has - at least for now - created an effective power vacuum just below him. Selecting a political nobody as premier and being sick much of the time don't help the situation.
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