Did You Miss Him?
Yup, he’s back. Not that he ever went away of course. Out of the dozens of articles examining Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he will be running for President, Julia Ioffe’s piece in Foreign Policy is particularly insightful. Here are some bleak predictions for a Putin weary-world:
So what will happen now that the end and beginning are one? Some are predicting a new wave of immigration — or a class of dual-citizenship holders — for those who had other things in mind for the next 12 years. Others see Medvedev, as prime minister, shouldering the blame for the next wave of economic crisis. (“Prime ministers are easy to replace,” notes Lipman.) Still others see Putin steering the ship of state for a few more years and stepping down early. But Kolesnikov sees 12 more years for Putin, “because it’s the first version” again. Pavlovsky, though, sees altogether different man: “The Putin of 2000 was a politician I loved, but that Putin is dead,” he says. “And the Putin of 2007 is gone. Today’s Putin is a zombie.”
What’s certain, however, is that the office of president — buttressed as it was by the degradation of every other institution over the last decade — has lost quite a bit of its legitimacy. And United Russia, created a decade ago to be the country’s new ruling party, has apparently been dealt a body blow. It’s being slowly swallowed up by the nebula that is a new entity set up by Putin known as the National People’s Front, while United Russia will now be led through the parliamentary elections by Medvedev, a man who was just publicly stripped of his scepter. That may be good news for people who see United Russia as the Party of Crooks and Thieves, but where does that leave Russia? “I think we’ll see a decline in the authority of the government, people will see it as silly, as odious,” says Pavlovsky, “and power will have to lean increasingly on those who depend on it for wealth, for status. That’s not a healthy scenario, but it will be with us for a long time.”
Which is perhaps why so much alcohol was traded hands via Twitter in the aftermath of Saturday’s big announcement. Someone lost a couple beers on their presidential bet, others won cases of cognac. I won a bottle of Hennessy. Others just wanted to get to drinking away their shock at suddenly facing what’s been hidden in plain sight these four years. At the very least, it might pleasantly confuse them about where the rotating door might spin in the future.
Read the whole article here.
