Billionaire businessman Mikhail Prokhorov is not satisfied with being one of Russia’s richest people and its most eligible bachelor. He also wants to be its prime minister.
The playboy industrialist has almost no experience in politics and the small Right Cause party he took over in June is polling at only 3 percent support three months before a parliamentary election.
But that is no obstacle to a man who started out selling jeans and by the age of 46 has made a fortune in nickel, owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team and, many political analysts say, has the tacit approval of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
“Like all the oligarchs, Prokhorov has achieved all he possibly can in business and has been an enormous success very quickly. He’s still quite young so why not try a different career?” said Boris Makarenko, an analyst at the Centre for Political Technologies think tank in Moscow.
Prokhorov, ranked by Forbes magazine this year as Russia’s third-richest man with an estimated fortune of US$18 billion, makes no secret of his ambitions.
“I think I could handle the prime minister’s job,” he told a news conference on Aug. 11.
He said almost nothing about his plans at the news conference, declining even to say whether he wanted his party to be to the left, to the right, or centrist. His one policy proposal, that Russia should abandon the ruble in favor of the euro, was widely ridiculed.
Since then Prokhorov has produced an election manifesto, made dozens of public appearances and shown his determination to prove more than just the joker in the pack as one of the few unpredictable factors in the Dec. 4 election.
Other parties are hardly out of the starting blocks in the campaign to the State Duma lower house, but he has already pasted posters across Moscow showing his face and the slogan: “Strength lies in power. The one who is right is stronger.”
ELECTION DOMINANCE
Putin’s United Russia party dominates the Duma with 315 of the 450 seats and is sure to be the strongest party in the next parliament, setting the stage for Putin to return to the Kremlin if he decides to run in a presidential election in March.
However, opinion polls show United Russia’s popularity has slipped and Putin is looking for new faces in politics, partly to prove his reformist credentials and to hit back at critics who say democracy is lagging in Russia.
The political entry of Prokhorov, a whiz kid of Russian finance who earned a fortune by selling a one-quarter stake in mining behemoth Norilsk Nickel just before the 2008 economic crisis, is widely thought to be backed by Putin.
As an oligarch, he is unpopular with many Russians and therefore unlikely to become a threat to the Kremlin.
His image was also damaged by an incident in 2007 when French police detained him on suspicion of arranging prostitutes for guests at the Alpine ski resort of Courchevel, but he denied any wrongdoing and was later cleared of the charge.
Even so, Prokhorov could have a role as a safety valve for limited criticism and he has already shown he is not afraid to take the government and the Kremlin to task.
“No Russian parties are independent political actors and all are manipulated by the executive. The party [Right Cause] is definitely a Kremlin project,” Makarenko said. “But if Russia modernises, if Prokhorov’s party takes an active part in that and wins support among broader sectors of the population, who will care how it was created in five years?”
Although Right Cause may struggle to secure 7 percent of votes in the election, the minimum required to take up seats in the Duma, Prokhorov could still build the foundation of a political future if he wins liberals’ votes in the big cities.
“I think it’s possible that even if Prokhorov does not get into parliament in this election, he could go on to have a career in politics,” said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
SCAPEGOAT?
Plenty of pitfalls lie ahead for Prokhorov. In his two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, Putin reduced the political influence the oligarchs gained in the 1990s under former Russian president Boris Yeltsin and told them to stay out of politics.
He will be particularly anxious to avoid the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who fell out of favor with Putin after showing political ambitions. He is still in jail after having his business empire carved up and sold.
Prokhorov has a lot to lose as he has a 17 percent stake in Rusal , the world’s largest aluminium producer, and a 30 percent stake in Russia’s top gold producer, Polyus Gold.
Could he become prime minister? Petrov said Prokhorov could be a fall guy for Putin if he returns as president in March and wants a prime minister to carry out economic and social reforms.
“If he comes back as president, and I am almost certain he will, Putin will definitely need a prime minister who will undertake very painful and unpopular reforms,” Petrov said. “It’s a job for one year to undertake these reforms and then become a scapegoat ... Prokhorov is an ideal candidate for this as an oligarch who can never count on mass support.”
This might please investors who regard Prokhorov as an energetic liberal and a good manager.
“If he is the next prime minister, I think this will be viewed very positively, at least initially,” Dmitry Kryukov of Moscow-based Verno Capital told Reuters Insider television.
Prokhorov is still something of an enigma, but Right Cause’s manifesto, published late last month, gives some indication of what Prokhorov would do if he makes it into the Duma.
The manifesto accuses the presidency of being an “all powerful” monarchy, sets out to woo disgruntled middle-class voters and warns of an economic crisis if reforms are not carried out. It calls for free education and medicine, and proposes price fixing of state monopolies.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth