There are undoubtedly situations in which a leader
simply cannot negotiate with the opposition, when concessions only
whet his rivals' appetite and the leader's own lieutenants are so
entrenched that they're terrified at the prospect of surrendering
power. But this was emphatically not the case in Georgia, Ukraine or
Kyrgyzstan, all of which have recently seen a change of regime. In
all three cases, the opposition would have continued to work within
the existing system if not for the meddling of the current leaders.
By falsifying election results and throwing their rivals in jail,
these regimes turned opposition leaders into revolutionaries.
The simple idea that when people's votes aren't
counted they take to the streets applies not only to the
Commonwealth of Independent States. Politicians in those Baltic
countries where a significant proportion of the population does not
have the right to vote should realize that by denying these people
the right to express their discontent at the ballot box they are
laying the groundwork for revolution.
Case in point: The Kremlin's distrust of democratic
elections is rather remarkable. After all, the current leadership
owes everything to the relatively free parliamentary elections of
1999 and 2003. The 2004 presidential election, which provided
President Vladimir Putin with a low level of legitimacy, was a
fairly rare phenomenon: The election itself was rigged but the
results were not. The lesson to be learned is that if the
president's approval rating is 60 percent, you can rig the electoral
process on one condition: His approval rating has to be real, not a
fiction intended for the president's eyes only. How the president is
supposed to gauge his popularity accurately in the absence of a free
press is another matter.
In any case, my advice to Kazakh President Nursultan
Nazarbayev is: "Don't falsify election results." If his party or his
daughter in a single-mandate district election receives 60 percent
of the vote without ballot-stuffing and a clampdown on television,
no opposition at home or abroad will frighten them. If not,
Nazarbayev would be better off allowing his supporters to lose an
election rather than fleeing the presidential palace in a helicopter
one day and spending the rest of his life wrangling in the courts
with the government of his own country over some assets in a Swiss
bank. I'm thinking, of course, of the late Philippine leader
Ferdinand Marcos. He won his first two terms in free and fair
elections, but when it came time for him to step down, he decided to
stay in power, leading to 10 years of military dictatorship, stolen
elections, mass demonstrations, and finally a suitcase, the airport
and Paris.
The example of Marcos also demonstrates that leaders
are well advised to think about what their former allies are in jail
for. If the official charge of abuse of power is correct, the crowds
in the streets won't free them and carry them on their shoulders to
the presidential palace. If the official charges were fabricated,
however, it's better to let these people go and perhaps even to
apologize. Otherwise they'll get out of jail on their own and emerge
mad as hell and more attractive than ever, like Yulia Tymoshenko.
This is my advice for Nazarbayev, but I have no objection if anyone
else wants to put it into practice.
Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the New Economic
School/CEFIR, wrote this column for Vedomosti.
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