RBC’s interlocutors found it difficult to assess the likelihood that a communist would eventually receive the post of head of the region. A source in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation told RBC that it would be “logical and correct” to appoint acting governor Sergei Kazankov, also because there are “no strong figures” among the authorities in Mari El. But, according to him, no one has come forward with such proposals to the leadership of the party, and in general, such a scenario seems “doubtful”.
The current head of Mari El, Alexander Evstifeev, is 63 years old. He won the election of the head of the region in 2017 with a score of 88.3%.
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RBC sources called Evstifeev a man close to the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Sergei Kiriyenko. In 2000-2002, he served as deputy plenipotentiary representative of the president in the Volga Federal District, Kiriyenko was the plenipotentiary at that time. Later, Evstifeev was a senator from the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, then chairman of the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal, professor at the Department of International Private Law of the Saratov State Academy. Prior to his appointment to the post of Acting Head of Mari El, Evstifeev served as Chairman of the Arbitration Court of the Moscow Region.
“Mari El is a poor region with vague prospects. Nobody managed to create a power vertical in it due to the lack of strong leaders,” says regional policy expert Rostislav Turovsky.
The deputy from Mari El said about the distortion of his words about “power from God”
“After the arrest of the peculiar leader of the republic, Leonid Markelov (the head of Mari El in 2001-2017. — RBC]the new authorities failed to sow social optimism, public opinion was and remains depressive. Against this background, just the effective enterprise of the communists of the Kazankovs became a model, and its development contributed to the growth of the popularity of the Communist Party, since the authorities cannot create anything like this, ”the expert continues.
As a result, according to him, the appointment to the leadership of Mari El looks like something akin to punishment: “Evstifeev apparently understands this and is not particularly striving for power in the region. The team of immigrants from Saratov, on which he relied in domestic politics, did not figure it out with the region, they had to part with it.
If the governor is replaced in Mari El, then theoretically it is possible to rely on a young Varangian manager with connections in the center like Artem Zdunov in Mordovia, Turovsky believes.
How Mari El lives
The Republic of Mari El is among the most sparsely populated regions of Russia: as of January 1, 2022, about 670 thousand people lived there, according to Rosstat. The republic accounts for 0.2% of the total gross regional product (GRP) of all Russian regions. The economy of Mari El is mainly dependent on manufacturing (26% of GRP) and agriculture (18%), while there is almost no mining in the republic.
Although industrial production in all of Russia grew by 5.3% in 2021, in the Republic of Mari El, the industrial production index decreased by 1.3%. The average nominal salary in January-November 2021 was 34.6 thousand rubles. (compared to the all-Russian indicator of 54.6 thousand rubles). The unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2021 was 4.4% – almost at the level of the whole of Russia (4.3%).