A FAMILIAR political drama has played out in Moscow as Russia’s autocratic rulers prepare to stage elections for parliament and president in the next nine months. First, a coalition formed by the country’s leading liberal opposition figures was denied registration as a political party last week, supposedly on technical grounds — making it the ninth such party to be turned down in the past four years. Days later, a billionaire businessman with close ties to President Dmitry Medvedev was suddenly installed as leader of a previously dormant party called Right Cause, which describes itself as the pro-business alternative to the left-leaning United Russia party founded by Vladimir Putin.
Presto: Russia’s upcoming elections will feature a choice, other than Mr. Putin’s party and fringe players such as the throwback Communists. There will be no monopoly on power, the Kremlin’s spokesmen can say. But there will also be no opposition to the Putin-Medvedev regime — as Mikhail Prokhorov, the newly minted Right Cause leader (and owner of the New Jersey Nets NBA franchise) was quick to make clear. “Let’s forget the word ‘opposition,’ ” he said on accepting his new office. “There should be two parties of power, while there is only one now.”
The Kremlin’s tactic is not a new one. Official alternative parties were a standard feature of the Soviet bloc; in the 2007 parliamentary election, one called Fair Russia sprang up. If there is something slightly intriguing about Mr. Prokhorov’s vehicle, it is the indications that it serves the purposes of Mr. Medvedev, who is engaged in opaque deliberations with Mr. Putin to determine which one of them will be the regime’s candidate for president next year. Mr. Prokhorov echoes some of Mr. Medvedev’s ideas: that political power in Russia should be decentralized; that the economy badly needs to attract foreign investment; that corruption and lawlessness are serious problems. After the two met on Monday, Mr. Medvedev said that Mr. Prokhorov’s “ideas in some way correlate with my proposals.”
Western governments may be tempted to seize on this development as a seed of genuine pluralism in Russia — just as Mr. Medvedev has been courted by the Obama administration as an alternative to Mr. Putin. But true political competition will come when the regime agrees to allow movements it does not create or control to operate freely, to assemble without being assaulted by security forces, to have access to television and to register for elections. The State Department rightly objected when the Party of People’s Freedom — the real opposition — was denied registration. It is on seeking space for such groups, and not Mr. Medvedev’s Potemkin initiative, that the focus of U.S. policy should remain.