In a surprise speech in parliament on Tuesday, Russia’s leader of two decades tempered the fevered speculation about his future that began when he called for constitutional changes in January. Debate about what position Putin could hold once his current term ends in 2024 now appears redundant as he has signaled he will stay in the Kremlin.
If the constitutional change is approved, it would reset Putin’s presidential term count back to zero, meaning he could stand in the next two elections. If Putin does run for president in the 2024 and 2030 elections, he could be in charge longer than any ruler since Peter the Great, surpassing even Joseph Stalin. By the time of the 2036 election, Putin will be 83.
“He’s going for the record,” Andrei Kolesnikov, analyst for domestic politics at Carnegie Center Moscow, told POLITICO. “This is a personalized, harshly authoritarian regime, it’s not a hybrid. It’s the personal power of one person, absolutely vertical, which is being continued in an unconstitutional manner.”
Tuesday’s announcement began not with Putin but with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space and a national hero who is now a member of parliament for the ruling United Russia party — suggesting that the Kremlin had prepared the decision with the best public optics in mind.
Tereshkova was met with applause when she called on the parliament to stop “circling and overthinking” potential constitutional amendments and either remove the presidential term limit or “put into law the possibility for the current president to be reelected in accordance with the revitalized constitution.”
The speaker, a former top aide to Putin, duly adjourned parliament to consult with his former boss, and less than an hour later the president himself strode into the chamber.
Noting that the United States only adopted term limits after Franklin D. Roosevelt had shepherded the country through the Great Depression and World War II, Putin argued that Russia was too “vulnerable” to political infighting and attempts at “containment” by Western countries for him to step aside. The president should “guarantee stable development,” he said, echoing a favorite refrain, because “we’ve had enough revolutions.”
“There will come a time when the highest presidential power in Russia won’t be so personalized, when it won’t be associated with one person, but our history has developed a certain way, and I can’t ignore my responsibility before the citizens of the country,” he said.
Changing the term limit and allowing him to run in the next election “would in principle be possible if citizens support this amendment in the vote on April 22, but under one condition, that the Constitutional Court rules that this amendment won’t violate the country’s main law, the constitution,” Putin said.
It’s virtually guaranteed that this will happen. The Constitutional Court has in the past been quick to approve the Kremlin’s initiatives, and surveys suggest Russians are mostly indifferent to the April 22 referendum on the constitutional amendments, which has no legal bearing on the process anyway. The parliament voted 380-44 for the amendment to reset the term limit when the constitutional changes are adopted.
According to recent polling, 27 percent of Russians want Putin to remain president after 2024, 33 percent want him to be in a top decision-making post, and only 27 percent want him to leave politics.
The State Council, a body to be given new powers as part of the constitutional changes and tasked with determining the country’s “strategic direction,” had been seen as the most likely spot for Putin to land after he left the presidency. But last week he said he wouldn’t take the post as it would lead to a “duality of power” and conflict with the presidency, which must remain strong.
According to Kolesnikov, head of the State Council was not enough to “guarantee his personal and political security.”
But Oleg Ignatov, a former ruling party functionary who now works for a think tank that has consulted for the Kremlin, argued that Putin knew he would seek to remain president when he called for constitutional changes in January. If that’s true, it means the deliberations on the State Council were simply elaborate political theater to, as Tereshkova put it, “circle” around the real issue.
“The question of his power could not be decided on its own, it had to be brought in a package of changes, so that there wouldn’t be negative reaction from society, and so far we have seen a calm reaction from society,” Ignatov said. “Rather than a shock to society, it’s a drawn-out intrigue.”
In addition, Russia’s oligarchs and political and security elites can rest easy knowing that “everything will develop according to the rules of the game that have existed for 20 years,” Ignatov said. “There won’t be any divvying up of power or property because the elite connects all of this to the personal figure of Putin.”
“The constitutional amendments discussion has evidently created a lame-duck situation,” that threatened Putin’s grip on power, said analyst Yekaterina Schulmann. “So to avoid that, it became necessary to signal to the elites that the incumbent has an option to stay in place after 2024. The system is in such a state that it needs to survive today and tomorrow, not four years hence.”
No change at the top
More liberally minded Russians, however, are angry at the idea of 12 more years for the former KGB officer.
The annual Moscow march in memory of slain opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in February, which was jointly billed as a protest against Putin’s constitutional changes, drew 22,000 people, more than twice as many as last year.
After Putin’s speech Tuesday, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia and other opposition parties called for a protest on March 21. “We are talking about the usurpation of power by Vladimir Putin. A country where the government hasn’t changed for 20 years has no future,” they said in a statement.
Their request to hold the demonstration could easily be turned down by the mayor’s office, especially since Russia has canceled events such as the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in the name of fighting coronavirus.
Still, the biggest problem for Putin’s continued rule will be a flagging economy. He had promised a spending boom with subsidies for education, housing and young families in his speech in January. That same month, the public’s trust in Putin reached a six-year low of 35 percent, polls showed, although his approval rating remained stable at 68 percent.
On Friday, however, Russia sent the cost of oil, its main export, into a spiral when it walked away from production cut talks with Saudi Arabia, even amid market volatility over coronavirus. As Brent crude descended to $35 a barrel, the ruble exchange rate tumbled to a four-year low.
While Russia’s finance ministry has said its $150 billion national wealth fund will allow it to stick to its high-spending budget, low oil prices don’t bode well for Putin’s promises of growth. Russia’s economy, which is dominated by state-owned corporations, expanded by only 1.3 percent last year.
If the situation worsens, Putin could still call a snap presidential election to preempt a potential fall in his ratings, even though he spoke out on Tuesday against an early parliamentary or presidential vote.
Yet in the long term, the government’s ineffective policies could bring an economic collapse and a sudden end to Putin’s rule, Kolesnikov warned.
“I don’t see any economic growth under state capitalism,” he said. “We don’t see any signs of growth based on market competition.”
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