Right Cause, a tacitly Kremlin-sponsored party headed by New Jersey Nets basketball team owner Mikhail Prokhorov, had been expected to draw on the support of opposition-minded and pro-business voters ahead of the Dec. 4 elections for the State Duma, Russia’s national parliament.
But in the wake of a mutiny within the party’s ranks, Prokhorov has announced he is ditching Right Cause.
“I personally call all those who back me to leave that puppet Kremlin party,” Prokhorov told a meeting of supporters in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
A breakaway faction of the Right Cause gathered across town to claim its right to the party.
The chaotic developments around the nominally pro-business party have injected an unusual degree of excitement into Russia’s largely static political scene. In the “managed democracy” system nurtured under Vladimir Putin’s rule as president and now prime minister, most parties represented in parliament have taken their cues from the Kremlin.
Right Cause, which has been led by Prokhorov since earlier this year, was created in 2008 as the result of a merger between three center-right parties. It currently has no deputies in parliament. It had been expected to make a healthy showing in the December election, but without the benefit of Prokhorov’s profile and financial resources, the future of the party now looks bleak.
Prokhorov, 46, was ranked Russia’s third wealthiest person in the most recent Forbes rich list with a fortune worth around $18 billion.
The Kremlin appears to be irked at Prokhorov’s appeal to potential voters for Putin’s overwhelmingly dominant United Russia party and his criticisms of the government — even though Prokhorov has been at pains to insist he should not be considered an opposition figure.
Even Thursday, Prokhorov stopped short of attacking either Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev, but instead lambasted Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s seldom-glimpsed political strategist.
“We have a puppeteer in the country, who long ago privatized the political system and who for a long time has disinformed the leadership of the country about what is happening in the political system, who pressures the media, places people (in the media) and tries to manipulate public opinion,” he said, referring to Surkov.
Several candidates put themselves forward Wednesday in a bid to depose Prokhorov as leader of Right Cause. Ostensibly, the cause of the split appears to have centered on anti-drug activist Yevgeny Roizman, who Prokhorov has insisted on including in the party list over the objections of many members.
Roizman is a contentious figure criticized by many for the harsh drug treatments that he has championed. Party officials have also complained that his previous criminal conviction for theft and fraud make him an unsuitable candidate.
One of Prokhorov’s main antagonists within Right Cause to emerge this week is Andrei Bogdanov, a leading Freemason who garnered 1.3 percent of the vote in a 2008 presidential run. Another is Andrei Dunayev, who sits on the party’s executive council.
Observers are divided over whether the drama surrounding Prokhorov has been orchestrated as an effort to create the artificial impression that he is a real opposition figure.
Masha Lipman, an analyst the Carnegie Moscow Center, said she believed the tension was “genuine,” but that this did not mean that Prokhorov and the Kremlin had never had talks about his political future.
“Otherwise, he would not have been able to go on television and campaign,” Lipman said.
Mikhail Delyagin, an economist attending Prokhorov’s congress as a guest, said the businessman had come into conflict with the Kremlin by forging his own path.
“He took off the Kremlin dog collar,” he said.
Already, the support of Russian government media appears to have slipped away from Prokhorov.
State television has given him a fair degree of favorable coverage in recent weeks, but the midday news of the main Channel One station made no reference at all to the furor around Right Cause, which has dominated Russian blogs this week.
NTV, a channel owned by state-owned energy company Gazprom, led its afternoon news bulletin with coverage of the breakaway Right Cause faction and showed only a brief clip of Prokhorov.
United Russia is expected to sweep the Duma elections, although authorities have grown visibly concerned over the disaffection and political apathy displayed by Russian voters.
