Since he was elected president for the fourth time in 2018, Moscow's political insiders have gossiped about who Vladimir Putin would choose to succeed him to run Russia. On Wednesday, he definitively answered that question: he chose himself.
In the biggest overhaul of Russian politics for decades, Putin surprised the country's establishment with his timing, if not the ultimate outcome. He announced he would seek to rewrite the constitution to beef up the power of parliament and reduce the clout of the presidency, in effect neutering his direct successor and opening up an easy route to maintain his grip on the country.
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In a 70-minute speech, Putin addressed the burning question over the future of his reign but also posed a handful more over just how the new system would work, and his exact role.
Most importantly, he killed stone dead the rising hubbub of those jostling for influence around him and the dreams of would-be usurpers. Putin may not have gone as far as Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is now in effect "president for life", but he made it clear that the man who has already run Russia for 20 years has more decades left in the tank — regardless of what job title he might have.
"Putin wants to have a concrete mechanism of power and levers he can use. He doesn't want to be . . . the old man using his spiritual authority to command everyone," one person close to the Kremlin says. "Now he has a few years to think about how to do the transition. He can safely set off the cockroach race among the competitors."
Putin's overhaul had immediate repercussions. Within a few hours of Putin's speech ending, his longtime ally Dmitry Medvedev stepped down as prime minister and his entire government resigned.
A day later a previously little known government official, a tax technocrat with a mandate for economic renewal, was sworn in as Medvedev's replacement in the fastest-ever change of Russian premier. Putin's regime — which has looked tired, grey and has lost public confidence in recent years — had a feeling of being immediately refreshed.
The shift away from a presidential-led system — which Putin strengthened for his own advantage — to a stronger parliament with the power to choose the cabinet gives Putin a wealth of options to remain and even strengthen his power when his fourth term as president ends in 2024.
He could return to the role of prime minister, a position he held between 2008-12 in a job swap with the loyal and pliable Medvedev; step outside of direct politics by leading an empowered State Council that would ultimately dictate policy to the government; or take a back-seat role as head of the ruling party, controlling events through a powerful parliamentary majority.
Many people inside Russia's elite have in recent months spoken privately of jostling for power among those directly below Putin, with an eye on 2024.
Few think Mikhail Mishustin, the former head of Russia's tax agency who did not have an English-language Wikipedia page before being plucked from obscurity to be premier, is a potential long-term successor. Instead, Putin's overhaul gives the 67-year-old president more time to work out how best to ultimately hand over power.
But other insiders say this week's announcement was long planned. Rather than being sparked by a desire to blindside potential rivals, it instead stemmed from a desire to create a political tumult in which the only constant was his own authority.
"The new prime minister will be a technical figure even if someone thinks he is Putin's successor because the executive is really run by the Kremlin, the [security] agencies and Putin's inner circle," says former Kremlin spin-doctor Gleb Pavlovsky. "It's a weird way to answer the demand for change because there is no change; the system is basically totally the same."
Since Putin won his fourth presidential term in 2018, with 76.7 per cent of the vote, public trust in his administration has been eroded.
After a rise in consumption tax, a change to the pension laws to make people work longer and tight fiscal policies that have seen the government run a budget surplus while real incomes have slipped, trust in Putin fell to a 13-year low of 31.7 per cent last summer, before the Kremlin ordered a revamp of the polling methodology.
The sense of drift has become an increasingly thorny issue with parliamentary elections set for 2021, and has exposed Putin's rule — considered ironclad outside of Russia — as potentially vulnerable.
Medvedev's move from the premiership to a new role as vice-chairman of Putin's State Council appears to be an effort to reverse falling ratings.
"It's good for Medvedev to sit around while someone more energetic than him does the unpopular stuff," the person close to the Kremlin says. "Medvedev has really saved himself. It's not a promotion, but it saves his political future."
Amid the discontent that helped fuel a summer of protests last year in Moscow and other cities against government corruption and over-reach, Putin's ruling United Russia party lost seats at regional elections last September and many candidates chose to run as independents, in a sign of its toxic brand.
In response, Kremlin-friendly analysts began speculating about how Putin might seek to maintain power, including complicated plans such as ramming through a proposal to form a joint state with Belarus and appointing himself leader of the resulting entity, or taking on a "father of the nation" role like Kazakhstan's longtime leader Nursultan Nazarbayev did last year.
But resorting to a simple repeat of the 2008 job swap with Medvedev was seen as unworkable, given how far public trust in the prime minister has plunged in the past decade. A litany of corruption allegations, Putin's repeated decisions to direct public anger at government policies towards Medvedev to protect the Kremlin, and widespread perception of him as a figure of fun who does Putin's bidding meant that attempting to reinstall him in the Kremlin as a puppet president would have almost certainly sparked a repeat of mass protests that swept Moscow in 2011 and 2012.
Andrius Tursa, an analyst at Teneo, a political risk consultancy, says the moves were intended to stem the decline in public approval of the government and United Russia ahead of the 2021 parliamentary elections.
"The cabinet changes . . . most likely represent an attempt to mitigate growing public discontent with the government and the overall socio-economic situation in the country," he added.
Putin rose to power on the stroke of midnight on December 31 1999, when Boris Yeltsin, democratic Russia's first president, made the unexpected decision to step down, elevating the former KGB agent and head of the security service to the Kremlin.
That was the first democratic transfer of executive power in the entire history of Russia, and had a powerful impact on Putin, who has since always sought to bend or restructure the constitution to suit his interests, rather than break the constitution or invite charges of autocracy like many longtime leaders of the other former Soviet states.
But Putin's regime has sought to create the idea that he personally embodies Russia's stability and security, which has made it increasingly difficult for many to imagine a peaceful transition from him to any successor.
As a result, at the same time as United Russia's popularity began to slide, groups around Putin, including the nationalist, reactionary siloviki clan of figures connected to the security services, were making moves to assert their power against reformist figures, illustrated through high-profile arrests of businessmen, signs of consolidation in key industries and a reshuffle of regional governors.
"He has clearly given himself an empty playing field in terms of the future model of power," says the chief executive of a major Russian company, speaking on condition of anonymity. "He kept his cards close to his chest . . . [and now] has a number of options open, has lots of time to prepare and there is nobody who is a clear potential successor."
"None of the strong players who thought of themselves as potential successors now have any advantage," the chief executive adds.
In proposals that will be put to a public referendum, Putin's changes will mean future prime ministers will be appointed by parliament, and the prime minister will appoint their cabinet. At present, those responsibilities are vested with the presidency.
The State Council, currently an advisory body to the Kremlin, will have increased power, presidential terms will be limited to two and Russian law will be given precedence over international law, a proposal that Evghenia Sleptsova, senior economist at Oxford Economics, says "cements Russia's autocracy . . . [and] at the same time further erodes democratic standards".
"Our political system is at an age when it starts thinking about what it needs to change to keep everything the same. That's what this is: pretend to change some things but leave them as is," says Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist. Nonetheless, "political history is full of examples of small changes from above [that] can later fall apart and become completely different political processes," Schulmann adds.
"The people who drew up perestroika, those who declare wars in the hope they'd win it quickly, those who hold referendums thinking they'll win and wind up losing, people who don't expect to lose their re-election — it all happens."
Written by: Henry Foy and Max Seddon
© Financial Times
