By Vestnik Kavkaza
The Stavropol Territory governor Valery Zerenkov was rated as a governor with an average efficiency by experts of the communication holding “Minchenko Consulting”. The results of the survey Yeugeny Minchenko, Director General of the International Institute of Political Expertise, presented at the round-table “Political Strategies of Governors: estimation of efficiency.”
Minchenko told Vestnik Kavkaza that “Zerenkov got the region which is very difficult. There is a problem with the actual state of the economy, there is competition with Krasnodar Territory; while Krasnodar has ports that have access to the sea, Stavropol Territory does not have them. And the key problem that is creating a negative environment in the province, which is mentioned by almost all the experts, is the active expansion into the region from the neighboring republics, both physical, when people move there to live, and, in fact, the collisions that occur against the background of different views of what is improper, and in general, we really have an outflow of the Slavic population of the region. The problem is very complicated, very versatile, because the inhabitants of the Caucasian republics are also citizens of the Russian Federation, it is impossible to divide the citizens into first and second class. But, nevertheless, the problem exists, it is now probably one of the most striking ones. It was, by the way, actively discussed and used during the election campaign in the elections to the State Duma, when the list was headed by Igor Sechin, and "United Russia" had a good result close to the national average. But it is clear that it is difficult to solve this complex problem quickly.
We see today that Mr. Zerenkov is trying to position himself on this topic, trying to repeat some steps, such as the way his neighbor, Krasnodar Governor Tkachev, creates media space by making comments on the behavior of a young man from one of the national republics who did not stand up during the performance of the Russian national anthem, etc. But so far some systemic changes in this sense do not occur.”
According to Minshenko, “the question of evaluating the effectiveness of regional leaders is one of the fundamental issues, given the fact that today we are once again adopting the system of elections of governors, more than that - there are alternative systems. Was the transition to the appointment of heads of regions a mistake? There are clear statistics. 67 new regional heads were appointed during the period from 2005 to 2011. In this case, 27 of them were people who had nothing to do with the region. Amongst the new governors, 15 people left their positions without even having finished the first term, and I note that 10 of them came from outside. Three governors were not reappointed, moreover, as for eventually reassigned newcomers, three officials left their posts without having finished their second term. The federal government actually has admitted that those people who were assigned to the posts of governors have not been effective. This is not some estimate of the population, not an expert evaluation. Here it is, this simple assessment - the early leaving of very high percentage of people.”
