MOSCOW -- Moscow's powerful Mayor Yuri Luzhkov attacked Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Saturday while three former prime ministers failed to agree on a pro-reform alliance ahead of December parliamentary elections.
In back-room dealings that could hurt liberal reformers at the polls, ex-prime ministers Sergei Stepashin, Sergei Kiriyenko and Viktor Chernomyrdin announced they would not forge a unified team before the vote.Stepashin, abruptly fired earlier this month after just three months in the job, said he would strike out on his own and run for a parliamentary seat in his native St Petersburg.
Then by evening, flirtation between Chernomyrdin and Kiriyenko came to an end, with the latter saying he would join forces instead with controversial and largely unpopular former deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais.
The net result was a splintering of Russia's reformist right wing, which, if not healed, could boost Luzhkov's new left-center alliance with a fourth recent prime minister fired over the past year and a half, Yevgeny Primakov.
The other major force going into the polls consists of the Communists.
While his allies bickered, Luzhkov gave a foretaste of the tough criticism he intends to use to bolster the alliance of his Fatherland Party with regional leaders in the All-Russia group.
"The country is being robbed in a way which is unprecedented in its cynicism and permissiveness. Russia's weak authority is the only reason behind this," he told a Fatherland congress.
Luzhkov, a former Yeltsin ally, has broken with the president this year as he seeks to advance his national political ambitions. Either he or Primakov is likely to run for president in a summer 2000 election.
The mayor said Yeltsin's team had "turned into a regime which people cannot understand and which threatens the country."
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Yakushkin said Yeltsin had made mistakes in his presidency but that campaign rhetoric should not overshadow his accomplishments.