WHEN he is not bawling at Euro MPs in Strasbourg or embracing Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Vladimir Zhirinovsky is pressing the flesh in dreary industrial backwaters all over Russia, preparing for next year’s presidential election. But though the style is superficially Western, the content is not. No U.S. candidate could hope to win with anything resembling Zhirinovsky’s extremist platform, and American officeseekers have learned that confessions of serial adultery and publicly stated interest in group sex do not play well on the campaign trail. Zhirinovsky’s recent interview on his campaign boat with a female correspondent from Playboy, in which he invited her to strip and have intercourse with his son and bodyguards while he watched, has been widely reported in Russia. It caused some mirth but does not appear to have damaged his standing.
Perhaps this is partly because there is still deep cynicism over whether the promised elections, for Parliament in December and for the presidency by June 1996, will in fact take place. In his State of the Nation address in February, Boris Yeltsin pledged that both elections would take place as scheduled. But that has not reassured the doubters. They point out that Russia has no tradition of orderly transfers of power between political opponents. And with the president’s rating, in a February poll on voting intentions, at an all-time low of 3 per cent, submitting himself for re-election could be the equivalent of abdication. Cynics point to a recent statement by Yeltsin’s ally Vladimir Shumeiko, chairman of the upper chamber of the Parliament: “What Russia needs is not elections but stability.” Speculation continues that the men around Yeltsin are looking for a suitable moment in Russia’s continuing crisis to declare the need for emergency measures and the postponement of elections.
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