Russia: Putin’s plot to stay in power

Russian President Vladimir Putin “no longer has an understudy,” said Ukrayinska Pravda (Ukraine). That is the most obvious takeaway from Putin’s announcement last week of a constitutional shake-up and the subsequent mass resignation of his government. Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev—a Putin sidekick since the 1990s who obligingly served as placeholder president from 2008 to 2012 when his boss bumped up against presidential term limits—has now been shunted to a new role as deputy head of the nation’s security council and is no longer considered Putin’s automatic successor. Under Putin’s constitutional proposals, presidential powers will be somewhat curtailed, with the national legislature choosing the prime minister and the government. The State Council, up until now a largely decorative body, will get unspecified new powers. These changes are likely Putin’s bid to preserve his authority when his final presidential term ends in 2024. Which post he will then assume is uncertain, but he could be following the path set out by Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. After nearly 30 years as president, Nazarbayev transferred authority to the obscure Security Council and then assumed leadership of that body. Today, in Kazakhstan, the new president “is forced to agree with Nazarbayev on all key appointments and decisions.”

Why shake things up now? asked Vladimir Milov in The Insider (Russia). Putin has four years until his term expires, and there is no immediate economic crisis—just the usual slow decline and rot. The “only possible explanation is that Putin panicked” when he saw some secret polling that showed a deep plunge in his popularity. Even the “Russian establishment is tired of him” and well aware of “his negative role as the main deterrent to Russia’s advancement.” Further evidence for this theory is that Putin picked Mikhail Mishustin, the head of the tax service, to be his new prime minister. Mishustin is known for one thing: “squeezing the remaining meager juices out of the dying economy with an iron hand.” Putin has put him in charge because he fears the eventual collapse of the faltering economic system and he needs someone “who will provide him cash at any cost—including the further strangulation of the Russian economy.”

Mishustin is certainly no reformer, said Marc Bennetts in The Times (U.K.). Anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny published papers last week showing that Mishustin’s wife, Vladlena—named after Vladimir Lenin—declared income of nearly $13 million over the past nine years “despite not appearing to own a business or have a job.” Little is known about Mishustin, 53, except that he owns a $10 million mansion and has a side hustle composing melodies for Russian pop idol Grigory Leps. Mishustin is irrelevant, said Boris Vishnevsky in Novaya Gazeta (Russia). The new prime minister is just a “smoke screen for the main thing: preserving the existing system and Putin’s position at the helm.” The constitutional rewrite won’t change ordinary Russians lives at all. And the “so-called transition that is talked about so much is merely from Putin to Putin.” ■