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. He was able to accomplish this due to a number of strategies and factors, including benefitting campaign spending 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.
Background Yelstin's approval had tanked after he had introduced significant reforms meant to push Russia towards a market-based economy. 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. While some Russians (largely oligarchs) thrived under his reforms, many others faced significant hardships as a result of them. A significant portion of the Russian populace had faced increased poverty under his leadership. Additionally, crime rates had significantly increased during his presidency.
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. 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. 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. However, this alliance never merged into a single political organization. Yeltsin never officially joined the front, intending to maintain a level of separation between himself and partisan politics. Thus, it consequentially splintered, leaving him without a unified base of support.
Under Yeltsin's leadership, Russia faced the stigma of being a fallen international superpower. Russia encountered a massive amount of corruption and lawlessness. Russia's economy also faced a decline in industrial production and the Russian populace's qualify of life and life expectancy declined.
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.
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.
1993
Following the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, the Yeltsin government adopted a more nationalist and authoritarian agenda than they had previously championed. Yeltsin saw a favorable result in the 1993 constitutional referendum vote.
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. 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, 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. 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. 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. Zhirinovsky had espoused a protofascist views and "law-and-order" rhetoric laced with racist undertones. 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%. 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.
1994 Over the course of 1994, Yeltsin became more and more separated from core reformist politicians and organizations. At the same time, Yeltsin was also becoming more and more separated from the coalition government and its leader, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Instead, Yeltsin increasingly relied on the advice of First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets and his own bodyguard and confidant Alexander Korzhakov. Soskovets had been shaping Yeltsin's campaign strategy.
1995
The result 1995 legislative election was not better for Yeltsin. Core reformist (pro-Yeltsin) parties performed marginally worse than 1993, receiving a combined 25.5% of the vote. Core opposition parties garnered 42.5% of the vote.
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.
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.
The result of the 1995 legislative elections seemed to further indicate that support for Yeltsin's reformists was indeed in political decline. The largest reformist party at the time, Grigory Yavlinsky's Yabloko won only 6.9% of the vote. The next-largest reformist party, Yegor Gaidar's Democratic Choice of Russia, won a paltry 3.9%. Yeltsin's advisers viewed this as evidence that it would be disastrous for Yeltsin to campaign as a reformist/democrat. Indeed, polling in December placed Yeltsin behind both Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky.
Campaign strategies Soskovets 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. Soskovets worked alongside others, such as Alexander Korzhakov, to devise a strategy. 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.
Abandonment of Soskovets strategy 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. 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.
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. 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.
On March 23, in a meeting with Anatoly Chubais and members of Semibankirschina that polling showed him to be headed towards a defeat.
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.Россия Ельцина // The Wall Street Journal, 24 апреля 2007 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.
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. While Yelstin distrusted his campaign advisors, he placed great trust in the advice of his daughter. On March 23, day after the meeting with the Semibankirschina team, Yeltsin fired Soskovets, officially ending the Soskovets campaign strategy.
Adoption of a new campaign strategy 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.