Emilia Slabunova’s blog post, 08.06.2018

I think that this was a beautiful televised call-in show of the President. It perfectly allows us to see with naked eye the incompetence of our authorities and the inefficiency of the management system. Because when the President deals with certificates and waste dumps, he is approached with a request to “break through the walls” in the Stavropol Territory, we realise that the whole system that has developed and the institutions do not function. The personnel policy [of the President] also shows its inefficiency: the appointed governors who did not won in tough competition in reality, and were exclusively only in the bureaucratic corridors, are not able to solve even the most elementary problems.

While the personnel policy will be based exclusively on selection [of officials] proceeding from the principle of loyalty, everything will remain at it is now. We do not elect mayors anymore, elections [of mayors] in Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Tagil have just been cancelled. There come appointed mayors, and sometimes they can be called gastarbeiters from other regions who are responsible before voters [as they were appointed to their posts]. The example of this televised call-in show demonstrates us too well: feedback channels do not function at the level of municipalities and regions, the authorities put a shield between them and people.

And 2.5 million people who have flocked into this single window of feedback that opened a little, not even a channel, and are trying to somehow reach the authorities with their illnesses and problems. While we will have such a vertical and a system of manual control, we will get stuck in the problems.

The televised show demonstrated one more thing: internal problems are not discussed on our television channels, therefore they had to show for 4.5 hours closed schools and hospitals, broken roads and everything else. We need to discuss how many hospitals, healthcare of our citizens and all other problems, rather than Ukraine, Syria, Donald Trump, Europe, etc. Maybe then we will finally start solving  our problems.

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