Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

How's the old man changing?

According to The Economist's editors, there's something different about Putin's leadership lately. Nobody, it seems — not even the editors — are sure what the difference is.

Russia’s president: Alone at the top

STATE-RUN television is not usually the place to find news of corruption scandals involving officials close to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Murky business dealings have never been a bar to government service. When high-level bureaucrats fall, they usually go quietly. But viewers have recently been treated to quite a spectacle on Channel One: evening broadcasts full of current and former ministers, their lovers, their expensive homes and millions in misappropriated funds.

This nascent anti-corruption campaign began in October with the dismissal of Anatoly Serdyukov as defence minister… And on November 27th Rossiya-1 channel aired a documentary linking a former agriculture minister, Yelena Skrynnik, to a reported $1.2 billion fraud.

Putin

For Mr Putin, taking on graft in his own circle has several benefits. It is popular: between 2005 and 2012, corruption rose from tenth to third in the concerns of ordinary Russians. It is also an issue that unites his opponents. Mr Putin may dismiss democratic worries, but he sees himself as a popular leader, responsive to the national will. Legitimacy of a kind matters deeply.

Eight months after his election to a third term, Mr Putin’s support looks shaky. The polls give him some of his lowest approval ratings ever. So he feels “compelled to carry on a populist course, as if the elections were still ahead of him,” says Nikolay Petrov of the Carnegie Moscow Centre. Fighting corruption also defangs the most resonant complaint of the opposition…

All this feeds a sense of uncertainty, with the Moscow political elite “disoriented,” according to Mr Petrov…

For much of October and November, Mr Putin worked at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, rarely going to the Kremlin and cancelling foreign trips to Bulgaria, India and Turkey (though he is now going to Turkey next week). News reports discussed a possible back problem caused by flying an ultralight plane beside some wild cranes in September. The Kremlin dismissed this, saying only that Mr Putin had pulled a muscle while exercising…

Over the years, Mr Putin has played on traditional Russian deference to the leader while relying on manipulation of the media…

Compared with his early years in charge when he relied on economic aides like German Gref and Alexei Kudrin, Mr Putin has less faith in the counsel of those around him and more certainty in his own judgment. After a difficult year, he believes that he “owes his position to a hard-fought electoral victory, unlike his colleagues who have no mandate from the voters”, says Sergei Guriev of the New Economic School. On many issues, says one former adviser, Mr Putin “thinks he understands the situation, but in fact it can be quite incomprehensible for him”.

Decision-making in the Kremlin appears to be on hold. Mr Putin has slowed down progress on the budget, on pensions and on privatisation. This may partly be a prudent move to sit out recent turmoil in global markets. But the danger of what Chris Weafer of Troika Dialog calls a “deliberate policy of inactivity” is that Mr Putin waits too long, acting only when the next political or financial crisis hits him…