VECTORS

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Strong President, Weak Heart -- Russia's Recipe for Constitutional Crisis

By Walter Truett Anderson

Date: 11-05-96

President Boris Yeltsin's heart problems spotlight a potentially fatal weakness in Russia's evolving democracy: a strong presidency, a weak parliament and no office of vice president. Should Yeltsin die or become incapable of handling the duties of his office, how will the system accommodate to the huge power vacuum that will emerge at the top? PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson, a political scientist and a founder of the Institute for Global Governance, is author most recently of "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be" (W.H. Freeman).

Russia's current situation -- a strong president with a weak heart -- provides an important test of whether democracy can survive there.

Strong-president systems -- which is what Russia has -- usually handle this situation by providing for a vice-president. But Russia doesn't have any such office. It has a unique constitution -- unclear in some ways, untested in others -- which reflects the unique way that democracy has evolved there. Should President Boris Yeltsin die or become incapable of handling the duties of his office, Russia watchers all over the world fear a looming constitutional crisis.

Nearly all the world's democracies -- which now means most of the world's governments -- are either presidential systems or parliamentary ones. Presidential systems grew out of revolutionary movements and parliamentary systems out of evolutionary ones, notes Prof. Fred Riggs of the University of Hawaii. The U.S. constitution, which became the model for many others, created a strong president to take the place of the king. The parliamentary systems grew more slowly, as pro-democratic forces gradually wrested power from kings but kept them on the throne as ceremonial heads of state. (Later parliamentary systems chose to have presidents as heads of state, with little or no power.)

Although the presidential system has worked reasonably well in the U.S. -- over 200 years of peaceful transitions through wars, assassinations, resignations and disputed elections -- it hasn't exported well. Many countries in the Western Hemisphere adopted systems of presidential government modeled on the U.S., but nearly all of them have had at least one complete constitutional breakdown with lapses into periods of chaos and dictatorship.

Most of the successful, democratic systems in major countries in the world today are parliamentary ones. In parliamentary systems the real center of power lies in the legislatures -- which elect the prime minister -- and the illness of a leader doesn't present the same kind of a potential power vacuum.

Russia's political system, in contrast to the early American republic, is an unstable product of both revolution and evolution. As a result, its feisty Congress, the Duma, is not going to decide who Yeltsin's successor will be in the event of his death.

Soon after their 1917 revolution the Russian Bolsheviks invented a third kind of arrangement, the single-party system -- in name a "dictatorship of the proletariat" but in practice a self-perpetuating regime of political elites with a dominant, usually all-powerful, leader. This habituation to strong leaders -- in Russia and the other Communist Party regimes -- helps explain why they opted for presidential systems when, after 1991, they ventured into democracy. "In times of transition such as the present, a country needs a strong leader with clear vertical lines of authority, top to bottom," argues Alexander Maximovich Yakovlev, one of Russia's leading constitutional scholars.

Most Russians would undoubtedly agree. And that's what Russia now has. The president is clearly in command of the government with the ability to fire the prime minister or dissolve the Duma at any time. And of course if Russia's strong president had a stronger physical constitution to go with his authority, there would be no cause for global alarm at the moment. But he doesn't, and there is.

The Duma, however, is far from being just a political ornament. Russia has a prime minister, who is chosen by the president. The Duma can vote no-confidence in the prime minister and the other ministers and -- if it does that twice -- the president is supposed to fire them all and put together a new government.

But the absence of a vice-president creates a potentially dangerous situation. If the president dies or becomes unable to carry out his duties, the prime minister temporarily takes over (although not with full presidential powers) and a new presidential election is supposed to be held within three months. The constitution doesn't say who decides when the president is unable to carry out his duties, and it isn't clear about what happens if the Duma votes no-confidence in the prime minister when there is no president. Both of these oversights could easily lead to a violent governmental breakdown with conflict between aspiring cliques or ambitious leaders.

But Westerners should not blithely assume that history has condemned Russia to despotism. In the U.S., a strong Congress has evolved over time as a powerful counterweight to the presidency, giving the system added stability. Russia's Duma is weak. But if the system accommodates to a sudden power vacuum at the top, the Duma could evolve in a similar way, drawing on the parliamentary-like role the Communist Party played under the Soviet Union.

In that case it will be time for the rest of the world to stop regarding Russia as an apprentice and recognize it as a full democracy.