‘Tsar Putin’ sworn in for fourth term

PLANS: SPECULATION HE WILL CLING LONGER TO POWER

New six-year term is supposed to be his last under the constitution.

Moscow

President Vladimir Putin, already the longest serving leader of Russia since Joseph Stalin, launched a fourth presidential term yesterday in which he has promised to improve Russian lives at home while showing no sign of backing down in his confrontation with the West.

Russian state TV showed the 65-year-old leader arise from his office, don a suit jacket and walk down the long redlined Kremlin halls to a waiting car.

In a lavish ceremony of pomp and splendour, Putin then took the oath of office in the resplendent pink marble Andreyevsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, the throne room of Russia’s czars.

In an apparent bid to show the breadth of Putin’s popularity, activists and volunteers from Putin’s re-election campaign joined official dignitaries among about 6 000 guests. So did action star Steven Seagal, whom Putin presented with a Russian passport in 2016, and the leather-clad leader of a pro-Kremlin motorcycle club who is known as “The Surgeon”.

The six-year term is supposed to be Putin’s last under the constitution. But speculation has mounted in Moscow that Putin will seek to hold on to power after 2024, perhaps by taking on a new, leader-of-the-nation role.

For now, his dominance of the nation’s political system seems ironclad. His popularity surged after he annexed the territory of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and many Russians have accepted his call to unite around the Kremlin amid the confrontation with the West.

To his supporters, Western sanctions and accusations of Putin’s complicity in US election interference or Olympic doping are simply means of keeping their country down.

But while Putin’s foreign-policy legacy after nearly two decades in power reflects a rise in Russia’s geopolitical ambitions that many Russians support, his accomplishments at home are less clear cut. Putin benefited from rising oil prices early in his tenure, but since 2008, Russia’s stagnant economy has grown at an average of just over 1% a year.

Thanking his outgoing ministers for their service on Sunday evening, he described the government’s “key task” for the coming years as delivering an “assured increase in citizens’ real incomes”.

In his state-of-the-nation address in March, he promised to halve the poverty rate over the next six years and to double state spending on roads, health care and regional development. “We don’t have the right to allow the stability we have attained to lead to complacency,” Putin said. – AFP