An opinion poll published this month by the Levada Center, an independent pollster based in Moscow, indicated for the first time that a majority of Russians want to see Medvedev’s government dismissed with immediate effect.
The decision Putin now faces is this: Does he bow to public opinion and fire Medvedev, who has often acted as a useful scapegoat for Russia’s economic and social problems, or does he let his unpopular government stagger on, risking a further blow to his own rapidly declining ratings in the process? Approval for the Russian president slipped from over 80 percent to 66 percent last year, while his trust ratings, which are measured separately, are at just 33 percent, according to Vtsiom, a state pollster.
Putin’s popularity levels “will really shoot up” if he dismisses his prime minister, said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter who is now a political consultant. “People will gain hope that the situation can be fixed.”
But the Russian president would have to time his move exactly right, said Gallyamov. “This is an instrument that can only be used once.”
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A rock fan with an enthusiasm for technology, Medvedev, 53, was once viewed by both Russian liberals and Western leaders as a counterweight to Putin’s authoritarianism.
In 2009, Medvedev came up with his memorable, if clumsy, catchphrase: “Freedom is better than non-freedom.” But his rhetoric about “modernization” and democratic values ultimately proved hollow. Today, Medvedev is better known for an infamous comment in 2016, when he told a group of elderly people who were complaining about their meagre pensions: “There’s no money, but you hang on in there. Cheers!”
Analysts have described his power-sharing arrangement with Putin as Russia’s “ruling tandem.” Medvedev, who has led the government since 2012, effectively kept Putin’s presidential seat warm between 2008 and 2012, to allow him to sidestep constitutional limits on consecutive terms in office. (Putin held the post of prime minister while Medvedev served as president.)
Now a growing number of Russians appear to think it’s time for Medvedev to go. The Levada Center Poll found 53 percent of respondents — up 20 percentage points from 2016 — want to see the back of him, citing the prime minister’s failure to tackle inflation and falling incomes. Only 40 percent of respondents say Medvedev and his Cabinet should stay on, with 8 percent undecided.
“If there was a suggestion that a different government was possible, one that would lead to genuine changes, then the numbers in support of dismissal would be higher,” Marina Krasilnikova, a Levada researcher, told the newspaper Vedomosti.
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The plummeting approval ratings for Medvedev’s government shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Discontent in the government has been growing steadily since June, when Moscow introduced a wildly unpopular law to increase the national pension age by five years, from 55 to 60 for women, and from 60 to 65 for men. Almost 90 percent of Russians were against the law, which was approved by Putin in October.
While government officials said the new legislation brought retirement ages in line with European norms, critics said that lower life expectancies in Russia mean that millions of people, especially men, will now not live to receive their pensions. Russian men can expect to live to 66, while for women the average life expectancy is 77, according to the World Health Organization. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov admitted last week that the government was caught off guard by the depth of public anger over the increase in the retirement age.
Russia’s economy is also creaking under the weight of Western sanctions and lower global prices for oil, the country’s main export.
The Levada Center poll was conducted after real disposable personal incomes fell for the fourth year in a row. Just over 13 percent of the population — around 20 million people — are living below a poverty level defined as an income of just €149 a month, according to government statistics. But those figures, say experts from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, fail to reflect the real scale of grinding poverty, which they estimate affects around 25 percent of the population.
Russia’s economic problems were neatly summed up just after the New Year, when shoppers discovered that supermarkets had begun selling eggs in packs of nine, rather than the usual 10, without adjusting prices downward. The so-called shrinkflation came after the government hiked value-added tax (VAT) from 18 percent to 20 percent on January 1, and also affected a range of other goods, from milk to fruit juice.
“The authorities have completely forgotten about the ordinary person,” Tatiana Kozlovskikh, a 62-year-old librarian from Zagarye, a village in central Russia, told the website Znak.ru, which recently ran a series of profiles of people facing financial difficulties. “Life has become harder. Everything is becoming more expensive.”
Kozlovskikh said she receives a monthly state pension of 9,000 rubles (€120), while her husband gets 10,900 rubles. “It’s impossible to save anything,” she said.
Things haven’t panned out as most ordinary Russians had hoped — or indeed, were promised they would.
Back in 2008, a few weeks after Medvedev triumphed in the presidential election, the ministry of economic development and trade forecast that by 2020 a burgeoning middle class would make up over half of the population, while average monthly salaries would be $2,700. Last year, average salaries were just under $650, while the number of Russians who can consider themselves part of the middle class is shrinking rapidly.
Anger over slipping living standards has been exacerbated by a series of ill-advised comments by officials in Russia’s regions.
“The government doesn’t owe you anything. Your parents, who had you, owe you. The government didn’t ask them to have you,” Olga Glatskikh, an official in charge of youth issues in the Urals region, said in November.
Her comments came shortly after Natalia Sokolova, minister for labor and migration in central Russia’s Saratov region, said pensioners should be able to live on 3,500 rubles (€46) a month. When challenged to lead by example, Sokolova declined, saying her “status as a minister” means she leads a very different lifestyle.
Both officials were dismissed after a public outcry, but the damage to the government’s reputation had been done.
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Valery Fokin, a 70-year-old retired journalist from Kirov, a city some 800 kilometers northeast of Moscow, said he doesn’t need to look at opinion polls to gauge just how unpopular the authorities have become. “[Medvedev] is not independent: He is Putin’s shadow, and one that is becoming grayer and grayer,” he said.
Fokin survives on a monthly pension of 15,823 rubles a month (€210), of which almost half goes toward public utilities bills. Like the vast majority of Russians, he supported the “return of Crimea” from Ukraine in 2014. He dismisses suggestions, however, that Western economic sanctions imposed over the Kremlin’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula are to blame for his worsening financial situation.
“The Russian people might put up with a lot, but they are not stupid,” he said. “People can see that sanctions, which state propaganda claims have ‘led to difficulties,’ have not prevented the mind-numbing enrichment of both Russian oligarchs with links to the authorities and heavyweight officials.”
Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, suggested that the dissatisfaction with “the government” that was reported by the Levada Center is in fact indicative of a broader disillusionment in Putin’s political system. Many people are “neutral or indifferent” to Medvedev, whose public profile is increasingly low-key, he said.
There is little sign, however, that mass anti-government protests are on the horizon. Last year’s pension reforms may have been vastly unpopular, but demonstrations against them drew, at most, tens of thousands of people, rather than hundreds of thousands.
And while dismissing Medvedev might provide Putin and his ruling United Russia party with a much-needed ratings boost, it would also be something of a “false start” with parliamentary elections not due until 2021, said political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya.
“It would be more logical to dismiss the government toward the end of its term, if ratings are low and the risks are high, so as to recharge the system and throw the dead weight overboard,” said Stanovaya.
But ultimately, she added, Putin’s decision may be influenced more by his personal relationship with Medvedev than the public mood.
The two men go back a long way, having first met in Leningrad — now St. Petersburg — in the early 1990s, when Putin was head of the city’s committee on foreign relations. Medvedev later ran Putin’s first election campaign, helping him secure the presidency in 2000.
“He is one of Putin’s closest allies, and there is a political deal between them that keeps Medvedev as the second most powerful person in Russia. This is in no way connected to issues of ratings, responsibility, or the attitudes of society to the authorities,” said Stanovaya.
“The tandem is still in force, just in a weaker form.”
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