Putin follows a familiar playbook to extend autocratic rule
It’s not always a thunderous midnight knock on a dissident’s door, or tanks rumbling through cobblestone streets, or a leaderfor-life’s face displayed on giant, ubiquitous billboards.
Sometimes, an authoritarian’s tightening grip on power is a far subtler affair – couched in the benign language of constitutional reform, perhaps, or conveyed as a mundane technical adjustment in the powers of certain governmental institutions. It can even take place in the guise of a seemingly free election.
Russian President Vladimir Putin – whose pluckedfrom-obscurity choice for prime minister won overwhelming parliamentary approval Thursday, to the surprise of virtually no one – is operating from an autocrat’s playbook that is old and new, analysts say. Elsewhere in the world, he has plenty of company.
“Dictators don’t voluntarily step away from power without some way to defend themselves and their assets,” said Marc Behrendt, the director of Europe and Eurasia programs at Freedom House, a Washington-based nonprofit group that promotes democracy and human rights.
That can mean a carefully calibrated campaign, sometimes taking place over many years, as authoritarian leaders work to make sure that not only they, but also cronies who prop up their governments, will be protected in the long term. Thus, personal power and personal financial gain can become inextricably entwined.
Scholars of democracy, particularly of its global erosion in recent years, say that in countries such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary or President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, a leader will often make calculated use of structures that are meant to strengthen the rule of law, employing them to weaken it instead.
That can involve methods such as undermining the independence of the judiciary, as activists have documented in Poland, a member of the European Union.
Or independent institutions such as a formerly free press can be co-opted, as in Hungary, also an EU member, through the buying up of news outlets by business titans friendly to the government.
Frequently, the most convenient vehicle for pushing through change that works to a leader’s advantage is the constitution, generally a country’s revered founding document or one adopted after momentous social change. For an authoritarian head of state or government, being able to characterize as constitutional even profoundly undemocratic actions – such as jailing political opponents in the name of national security – provides a veneer of legitimacy, analysts say.