Yeltsin Foe Is Elected Speaker of Lower House : Politics: Communist’s win in Duma comes a day after a supporter of the Russian leader is chosen to lead the upper chamber.
MOSCOW — As Boris N. Yeltsin basked in the limelight of a summit with President Clinton on Friday, the lower house of Russia’s new Parliament elected one of the president’s Communist opponents as its Speaker after a raucous dispute over a single paper ballot.
Ivan Rybkin, leader of the Communist faction in the old Soviet-era Parliament, won the leadership of the 444-member Duma with 222 clearly marked ballots in his favor and one in which his name was underlined and his rival’s crossed out.
A special vote-counting panel of lawmakers, after two hours behind closed doors, overruled a protest by Yeltsin’s supporters and awarded the disputed ballot to Rybkin, a member of the Agrarian Party that is led by Communist collective-farm bosses.
Rybkin’s only challenger also was a foe of Yeltsin’s reforms: Yuri Vlasov, a onetime Olympic weightlifting champion who got 23 votes. Pro-reform deputies, whose candidates had been knocked off the ballot Thursday, abstained Friday, trying to force the Duma to consider new candidates.
The vote came on the fourth day of the new Parliament’s session and a day after Yeltsin ally Vladimir F. Shumeiko was elected to lead the Federation Council, the upper house. The votes showed the two houses divided roughly evenly between pro- and anti-Yeltsin camps.
“We had been wondering, ‘How many people do we have on each side in Parliament?’ †said economist Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of a pro-reform faction in the Duma. “Today, we saw it is exactly half. That’s workable. We can have some hope.â€
Last fall, Yeltsin forcibly dissolved a Soviet-era Parliament that was stacked even more against him and jailed its chairman, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov. The new, smaller Parliament is less powerful, having come to life last month under a new constitution that strengthens the presidency. Yeltsin has stripped the Speaker’s office of funds to dole out perks such as cars, dachas and city apartments.
Even so, the new Duma promises to be a major headache for Yeltsin--if only because it is the bully pulpit of neo-fascist firebrand Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, whose party showed surprising strength in the Dec. 12 elections.
After a week of ranting and bellowing and pounding on the Speaker’s podium, Zhirinovsky got into a fistfight Friday with a pro-Yeltsin deputy who accused him of cutting into the Duma cafeteria line. The Interfax news agency said Zhirinovsky exploded, “Shut up while you’re still in one piece!â€
The Duma has provided entertainment for President Clinton, who called it a “product of democracy†and said he had followed its sessions on television during his European tour this week. “I enjoy watching the news every night,†he said. “It’s nice to be in a place where some other president’s having trouble with his Parliament instead of me.â€
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