The Guardian view on Putin’s power games: fake democracy
Vladimir Putin has been Russia’s president since 2012, but he has been running the country continuously for two decades. The arithmetic works because there was an interval, after Mr Putin’s first two terms, when he took the role of prime minister. He ceded the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev, a puppet who kept the seat warm until his boss reclaimed it. That pantomime revealed an attachment to the forms of democracy, when in practice they have been hollowed out by a campaign against political pluralism and civil society. Mr Putin has this week launched the sequel: constitutional reforms that would confirm the limit on any president serving more than two consecutive terms, but would start counting those terms from the document’s ratification. The incumbent’s record would not count, so he could run in 2024. Since the term length has already been extended from four to six years, Mr Putin could feasibly still be in the Kremlin in 2036. By then he would be 83 years old and have led the country longer than Joseph Stalin.
Many Russians already find it hard to imagine government under anyone but Mr Putin. State propaganda cultivates that passivity, casting the president as a stabilising figure and the embodiment of a self-confident nation. That message resonates with some people who remember the chaotic period after communist rule when – as the official narrative has it – Russia was humiliated by the west and needlessly surrendered territory to newly independent former Soviet republics. There are more complex reasons why the 1990s were unhappy for many Russians, but Mr Putin exploited the trauma to construct a nationalist doctrine. This provides cover for endemic corruption. The state tells its citizens their dignity is being restored, while picking their pockets. The trick has not gone unnoticed.
Mr Putin’s popularity ratings dipped last year and Russians have periodically defied police intimidation to protest against what looks increasingly like a stale kleptocracy. It wins elections partly because the stability-above-all narrative has enduring resonance, but also because alternative candidates are silenced and discredited. Activism against the government is a dangerous enterprise. But patience can wear thin. The Kremlin’s ability to manufacture ballot-box endorsements depends on brute force and the state’s capacity to support living standards. These have stagnated in recent years and Russia’s reliance on energy ex
ports makes it vulnerable to volatility in global markets. Downturns are often accompanied with nationalist agitation and by stirring anger against targets other than Mr Putin.
Fear of waning legitimacy lies behind the latest constitutional wheeze, although the president is confident enough of his position to put the changes to a referendum in April. That will be another simulation of democracy, although the pretence gives Russian liberals hope that the real thing is still possible. Each time Mr Putin goes through the motions of seeking consent he allows genuine democrats a moment of imagining a system in which their bad government can be peacefully replaced. Russia has an ignoble tradition of authoritarianism, but there is another tradition of dogged, courageous dissent, which Mr Putin cannot extinguish.