Campaign Exhaustion

In his speech yesterday before his cabinet, Vladimir Putin expressed a surprising amount of reticence that now that one campaign is over, another is beginning: It is a pity, of course, that we have one election campaign coming straight after another, with the presidential campaign now underway. People are no doubt tired of campaign tactics and political promotion, but, unfortunately, we now have to enter this next campaign, the presidential election campaign. Perhaps the new Duma could think about how to space these two election campaigns further apart in the future. But that is a matter for the members of the new parliament themselves, of course. It would be good to space the campaigns further apart so as not to burden the country with one campaign straight after another, but this is a technical matter and something that can be looked into later. It is peculiar to hear about campaign exhaustion from the president, whose enthusiastic promotion efforts seemed to totally saturate the public conscience over the last number of weeks.