Putin Remains President but He is No Longer the National Leader He Once Was, Gaaze Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 30 – Polls showing that Vladimir Putin has lost the support of a majority of Russians means that while he is still president, he is not the national leader he once was and could return himself to that status only by taking steps that would contract the  method of rule he has developed over 20 years in office, Konstantin Gaaze says.

            While on can be president and not a national leader regardless of one’s standing in the polls, the Moscow commentator says in an essay for the Moscow Carnegie Center, Putin faces the task of trying to recover the status of  national leader while remaining president, one difficult because of how and how long he has ruled (carnegie.ru/commentary/79343).

                Russia is “still not ‘a country against Putin,’” Gaaze continues; “but it is definitely a country which is little interested in the president and ever more frequently talks with the authorities at various levels in a demanding tone.” 

“One must not say that Russia is already on fire, but one can say with precision that it is headed in that direction and one of the causes is the lack of Kremlin  hegemony in  the direct sense of the word, in the sense of the absence of strategic leadership, and the absence of an ability to somehow organize things over the next five years.”

            According to Gaaze, “leadership presupposes a multitude of things, but the most important of them are the ability too set the agenda and not follow someone else’s, the effectiveness of one’s apparatus which transforms instrumental advantages into the political status of the leader, and a motivated and regularly renewed coalition of support.”

            All three things are compromised in Putin’s case at present.

            Since 2014, Putin has watched the rise and fall of the Crimean majority but also has gradually lost any “strategic initiative.”  Others are setting the agenda and Putin is responding, or he approves some agenda and then it disappears like water in sand.  And he gets blamed and so retreats from the issue at hand.

            And this is compounded by something else: Putin’s subordinates are increasingly afraid to show initiative on domestic issues even though it is precisely there that the president needs them given his continuing focus on foreign affairs. As a result, he and his team appear to be reactive rather than leaders.

            But underlying all this is what one can call the third repartition of property in the country (the first two being in the 1990s and the second at the start of Putin’s reign). Now all near the top are focusing almost exclusively not on his standing but rather on how much the pie they will get after 2024. That too keeps them from coming up with inspiring new ideas.

            All of this is giving rise to more protests by the population which now calculates not just how much repression the regime may use but also how likely it is that the regime will back down. There are “dozens” of these feedback loops, all encouraged by the regime’s uncertain and varied reaction.

            Could Putin regain the status of national leader? Yes, because he has a certain “’dark matter’” of support against certain kinds of things like the Roma case in Chemodanovka; but it isn’t infinite and it too is dissipating, Gaaze suggests.

            The alternative, of course, is to start to “reform the siloviki themselves.” Today, that is “the only scenario of an all-national campaign which society and part of the elite would support.” And there may even be within the FSB and other force structures people who would also like a different Russia after 2024.

            There is a trade off for the president. “He has one chance for a great report which would return him the status of national leader for a certain time. But the problem is that after 20 years of rule, he must propose to society something  more solid than the national projects” he thinks will work.

            “Crudely speaking, the following reform must in a certain sense liquidate that means of rule which the president has practiced” while in office.  He could do nothing, Gaaze says. “But then we will very quickly find out whether citizens now are prepared to put up with the excesses of the ruling class which is no longer protected by the authority of a national leader.”