Putin’s Future Threatened by His Most Loyal Followers, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 27 – Polls taken in the UK just after Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister carry a message for Vladimir Putin, Abbas Gallyamov says. And that message is simple: a leader may find himself threatened perhaps even more by those viewed as his most loyal followers than by open opponents if he remains in office too long.

            After Thatcher resigned, the former Putin speechwriter and political commentator says, 74 percent of British subjects agreed that she should have gone, even though 60 percent of the respondents declared that they backed her policies (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/4276 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/ugroza-dlya-putina-taitsya-v-samyh-loyalnyh-gruppah-naseleniya).

            Moreover, when British subjects were asked to rank Thatcher among all UK prime ministers in the past, they listed her second only to Winston Churchill – even though three out of four of them felt she had stayed in office too long. “It thus doe not at all follow,” Gallyamov continues, that any population wants anyone “to rule forever.”

            And that carries with it a real message to Putin, he says. The threats to his future “lies not only among the opposition but also among the currently most loyal groups of the population, many of whom may like his policies but feel he has been in office too long and “because ‘something needs to be changed.’”