| Campaigned For: | 1996 Russian presidential election |
| Candidate: | Boris Yeltsin President of Russia (1991–1999) |
| Affiliation: | Independent |
| Status: | Announced: 15 February 1996 Registered: 3 April 1996 Advanced to runoff: 16 June 1996 Won election: 3 July 1996 |
| Headquarters: | President-Hotel in Moscow[1] [2] |
| Slogan: | Now we are united! |
| Key People: | Anatoly Chubais (campaign manager and chairman of campaign council) Oleg Soskovets (campaign manager) Tatyana Dyachenko (key advisor and member of campaign council) Sergey Filatov (campaign organizer, head of campaign headquarters, co-head of ODOPP) Viktor Ilyushin (member of campaign council, co-head of ODOPP) Yury Yarov (executive head, member of campaign council) |
The Boris Yeltsin presidential campaign, 1996 was the reelection campaign of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 election.
Yeltsin was ultimately reelected, despite having originally been greatly expected to lose the election due to an immensely low level of public support prior to the official launch of his campaign.[1] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] He was able to accomplish this due to a number of strategies and factors, including benefitting campaign spending[8] which far exceeded the limits set by election laws, benefitting from an immense media bias in his favor, utilizing the advantages of his office, campaigning vigorously ahead of the first round, painting Communist Party nominee Gennady Zyuganov (his chief opponent) negatively, actively working to convince the Russian electorate that there existed a duopoly which left them no other choice but Yeltsin or Zyuganov (and convincing them that Yeltsin was the lesser of two evils), and repositioning himself to better appeal to the electorate.
Yelstin's approval had tanked after he had introduced significant reforms meant to push Russia towards a market-based economy.[1] [9] He had eliminated the majority of Soviet-era price controls, privatized a large number of significant state assets, permitted the ownership of private property, welcomed free-market principles, and additionally allowed for a stock exchange to be established and for commodities exchanges and private banks to be created.[9] While some Russians (largely oligarchs) thrived under his reforms, many others faced significant hardships as a result of them.[9] A significant portion of the Russian populace had faced increased poverty under his leadership.[9] Additionally, crime rates had significantly increased during his presidency.[4]
Yeltsin had originally risen to power on a populist message of anticorruption and an opponent of Moscow's establishment politics. A political maverick, he was cast-out by the Soviet political establishment.[1] [10] He found a base of support among liberal and pro-western democratic movements. In 1990, those movements united to form the Democratic Russia. This group held a base of power primarily in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the Urals.[1] This political alliance brought him into power in June 1991, and helped him to resist a coup attempt in August 1991. The alliance formed the base of Russia's first noncommunist government.[1] However, this alliance never merged into a single political organization.[1] Yeltsin never officially joined the front, intending to maintain a level of separation between himself and partisan politics.[1] Thus, it consequentially splintered, leaving him without a unified base of support.[1]
Under Yeltsin's leadership, Russia faced the stigma of being a fallen international superpower.[9] Russia encountered a massive amount of corruption and lawlessness.[9] Russia's economy also faced a decline in industrial production and the Russian populace's qualify of life and life expectancy declined.[9] [3]
As president, Yeltsin had allowed for a far more free media to exist than his Soviet predecessors had. In doing so, he not only allowed Russians to enjoy Western pop-culture, but he also permitted open criticism of his own leadership to be published by the press.[9]
Yeltsin promised in May 1992 that he would "absolutely" not seek a second term. However, observers doubted the authenticity of this declaration. No Kremlin leader in 1,000 years had voluntarily stepped aside to make way for a successor.[11]
However, at the same time as the constitutional referendum, the pro-Yeltsin and pro-reform Russia's Choice party fared disastrously in the legislative elections. Russia's Choice might have seen their prospects harmed by Yeltsin's own refusal to officially align himself with or endorse the party.[1] A reason for Yeltsin's refusal to voice his support of the party might have been a desire of Yeltsin's to continue to separate himself from partisan politics,[1] [12] while another reason might have been tension between Yeltsin and key members of the Russia's Choice party such as Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fyodorov.[1] Nevertheless, the party had been expected to garner as much as a 40% plurality of the vote. However, the party instead garnered merely 15.5% of the votes, placing behind Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, which received 22.9% of the vote.[1] Zhirinovsky had successfully appealed to a chunk of the Russian electorate that had grown tired of both the communist leadership of the past and the current "democratic" leadership under Yeltsin.[1] [13] Zhirinovsky had espoused a protofascist views and "law-and-order" rhetoric laced with racist undertones.[1] Combined, the core reformist (pro-Yeltsin) parties, including the Russia's Choice and Party of Russian Unity and Accord, received a mere 27.5% of the vote, whilst the core opposition parties received 43.3%.[1] The underperformance of the pro-Yeltsin forces in the 1993 legislative election alarmed some in Yelstin's camp of an urgent need for Yeltsin to revive his faltering public image.[1]
The opposition Communist Party gained power in the 1995 legislative election. Its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, had a strong grassroots organization, especially in the rural areas and small towns. Zyuganov had appealed effectively to nostalgia for an era of Soviet prestige on the international stage and socialist domestic order. It was already clear at this time that Zyuganov was going to challenge Yeltsin for the presidency the following year.[14]
In the 1995 legislative elections, Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party placed second with 11.18% of the vote. Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's centrist, non-reformist, party Our Home – Russia won 10.13%, placing third.[1]
The result of the 1995 legislative elections seemed to further indicate that support for Yeltsin's reformists was indeed in political decline.[1] [15] The largest reformist party at the time, Grigory Yavlinsky's Yabloko won only 6.9% of the vote.[1] The next-largest reformist party, Yegor Gaidar's Democratic Choice of Russia, won a paltry 3.9%.[1] Yeltsin's advisers viewed this as evidence that it would be disastrous for Yeltsin to campaign as a reformist/democrat.[1] Indeed, polling in December placed Yeltsin behind both Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky.[16]
See main article: page and Soskovets campaign strategy. Yeltsin's original, abandoned, campaign strategy had been devised by Oleg Soskovets in response to the defeat of pro-Yeltsin parties in the 1993 and 1995 legislative elections. Soskovets decided that for Yeltsin to win in 1996, he would need to adopt some of Zhirinovsky's style of rhetoric.[1] Soskovets worked alongside others, such as Alexander Korzhakov, to devise a strategy.[1] According to their strategy, Yelstin would need to position himself as an intermediate between the reformers and the Zhirinovsky-style protofascists by adopting the platforms of both. Yeltsin initially obliged, and took action to pivot and adjust his image accordingly.[1]
In late-January 1996, members of Yeltsin's inner-circle began to inform him that they were worried that Soskovets' strategy was a losing strategy.[1] At the same time, Soskovets' standing with Yeltsin was severely harmed after he failed to complete the campaign's signature drive by the deadline that Yeltsin had assigned him.[4]
By February, Yeltsin had begun to abandon Soskovets' advice. At this time, several shadow campaigns were hard at work to support Yeltsin's candidacy, and were developing alternative campaign strategies for Yeltsin to adopt.[1] By early February, Sergey Filatov (a former member of Yeltsin's government) had been appointed as the interim head of the campaign headquarters. Filatov was also tasked with laying the groundwork for Yeltsin's official campaign committee. Filatov's appointment consequentially supplanted much of Soskovets' authority within the campaign.[17]
On March 23, in a meeting with Anatoly Chubais and members of Semibankirschina that polling showed him to be headed towards a defeat.[1] [3]
Panic stuck Yeltsin's inner circle after their meeting with the Semisbankirschina made it clear to them that the opinion polls indicated that Yeltsin could not win. Some members of the inner-circle, such as Alexander Korzhakov, urged Yeltsin to cancel or postpone the election in order to prevent a Communist victory.[18] [19] Others, such as Yegor Gaidar, urged Yeltsin to forgo seeking a second term, so that they could instead run a reform-minded candidate that would capable of winning the election.[4]
Instead of abandoning his candidacy, Yeltsin reorganized his campaign organization. Yeltsin's own daughter Tatyana Dyachenko was instrumental in convincing him to replace Soskovets as his campaign head.[1] While Yelstin distrusted his campaign advisors, he placed great trust in the advice of his daughter.[20] On March 23, day after the meeting with the Semibankirschina team, Yeltsin fired Soskovets, officially ending the Soskovets campaign strategy.[1] [3]
The campaign's revised strategy became more clear after liberal figures solidified their control of the campaigns central leadership. They rejected the premise of the earlier Soskovets campaign strategy, believing that trying to appeal towards communists and fascists would be a losing strategy. Instead, they formed an entirely new strategy for his campaign.[1] [7]
Russia lacked a strong party system, thus partisan divides were less a factor for campaigns than they were in democracies with more developed party systems, such as France, the United Kingdom and the United States.[1] In both the 1993 and 1995 parliamentary elections, half of Russia's parliamentary seats were decided by voting in single-mandate districts. However, the other half was determined by a national system of proportional representation. Proportional representation encouraged the existence of a plethora of political parties and little incentive for party consolidation. In 1993, thirteen separate parties contested in legislative elections. In 1995, forty-three different parties did.[1] This was seen by the campaign's new leadership as being problematic to Yeltsin's candidacy. They believed that in order to win he would need to convince voters that he was the lesser evil, which he would be unable to effectively do without first convincing voters that they had only two options.[1] Essentially, the strategy was to manufacture a public perception that there existed a political duopoly consisting of Yeltsin and Zyuganov's Communist Party. They would instill such a perception in spite of the fact that Russia had a multi-party system.[1]
Under their new strategy, the campaign would work to recast Yeltsin as an individual single-handedly fighting to stave off communist control. The campaign framed a narrative that portrayed Yeltsin as Russia's best hope for stability.[21]
Under their new strategy, the campaign would also work to shift the narrative of the election into a referendum on whether voters wanted to return to their communist past (with Zyuganov), or continue with reforms (with Yeltsin).[5] [4] Rather than painting a new detailed vision for the direction in which he would take the nation during his second term, Yeltsin would provide voters assurances that the economic payoff of his reforms was around the corner, as well as stoke fears that Russia's economic situation would only worsen under communist leadership.[10] The decision to frame the election as a referendum on whether Russia should move forward towards a market economy or move backwards towards communism would prove to be one of the more important decisions that contributed the campaign's ultimate victory.[22]
Also important to the campaign's new strategy was to highlight the left's radical views and to portray Zyuganov as a government bureaucrat with no practical leadership experience.[23]
Under their new strategy, the campaign sought to replicate factors that had previously contributed to his victories in the 1991 presidential election and the 1993 referendums.[4] One factor that it sought to replicate was the public's perception of his leadership. In 1991, Yeltsin had been widely seen as a vigorous leader. This was no longer the case. Thus, Yeltsin took an active approach to campaigning in order to project a revival of vigor. Another factor was for Yeltsin to exacerbate the divide between the moderate and radical sides of the left-wing and to capitalize off of the resulting political polarization between factions of the left-wing.[23] [24] Yet another factor he replicated was the allocation of funds to popular causes, something he had also done in advance of the 1991 election and 1994 referendum. He also repeated tactics used in 1991 and 1993 by firing unpopular officials, slowing down the pace of economic reforms (a plurality of Russians felt that the reforms needed to be more gradual), and promising to pivot a number policies in the direction favored by the public. Another factor was to create an overwhelmingly pro-Yelstin media bias, similar to the one that Yeltsin had benefited from in the leadup to the 1993 referendums.[1] [24]
Many predicted that Russia would succumb to the same trend as many other post-Soviet transition democracies, where nationalist politicians unseated incumbent leaders.[25]
Before Yeltsin announced his intention to seek a second term, there was speculation that he would retire from politics due to his ailing health and the growing disapproval of his performance. At the time Yeltsin was recuperating from a series of heart attacks.[9] Despite some efforts to revive the public's perception, Yeltsin still possessed a strongly negative image, with both domestic and international observers taking note his occasionally erratic behavior.[1] Additionally, amid the aforementioned economic decline, Yeltsin encountered poor optics by enjoying the benefits of power, enjoying luxuries he himself had once criticized Soviet leaders for, such as chauffeured limos.[9] Yeltsin's popularity came close to zero.
According to the former Kremlin Chief of Staff Sergey Filatov, Yeltsin initially did not plan to participate in the elections, but with the success of the Communist party in the legislative elections, he changed this decision. Former Yeltsin adviser Sergey Stankevich claimed that then Mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak was considered as a candidate for the presidency instead of Yeltsin, as Sobchak had all the necessary resources and was seen to have a chance of winning. However, at the end of 1995 Sobchak finally abandoned this idea, and Yeltsin still decided to seek re-election.[26] [27]
In January 1996, Yeltsin distributed an internal memo, which was soon leaked in the press. The memo urged his government to undertake radical measures to ensure he would retain power. One of the suggested actions was to dismiss regional governors that did not provide a sufficient level of support to Our Home – Russia during the 1995 legislative elections. Other actions suggested in the memo were to channel government money into his election campaign, use state-run media to bolster his candidacy, cut funding to state-owned regional newspapers that supported opposition candidates, and to ensure that positions in the Central Election Commission were occupied by individuals favoring Yeltsin.[17]
On January 22, 1996, and Yeltsin stated that he would announce the final decision on whether he was going to run sometime between February 13 and 15. Yeltsin commented,