Putin’s Formal Speeches Won’t Affect His Ratings Much, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 10 – Many commentators said they expected Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly to boost his ratings with the population – or if not to send them down further, but his speech did neither, Abbas Gallyamov says, because of the nature of Russian politics as a whole and of such speeches in particular.

            On the one hand, the Moscow political scientist says, Russians do not see themselves as being involved in political life. Instead, politics is something behind the scenes. And believing that there is an enormous “gap” between words and actions, they are accustomed to “reading between the lines” (echo.msk.ru/blog/gallyamov_a/2385985-echo/).

                And on the other, Gallyamov continues, addresses like Putin’s are a particular genre with its own rules. Putin has two audiences when he delivers such speeches, the people and the bureaucracy. When speaking to the Federal Assembly, he is surrounded by the elite and becomes not ‘the leader of the people,’ but the chief bureaucrat of the country.”

                Everyone knows just how much love the Russian people has for this “establishment.”

            “If we want to a rise in ratings, then  one must speak not before the establishment, even more under conditions of the growth of protest attitudes, but ‘before the people.” Unless that happens, the president’s public performances are not going to help him, the political scientist says.

            Evidence for this comes from the United States. When presidents deliver their State of the Union addresses, these speeches barely move their ratings; but when they are running for office, their speeches drive their ratings up or down because people recognize that they are being asked to make a choice.

            And behind that, Gallyamov says, is another factor that works against such formal speeches having a big effect on ratings. Such addresses are “PLANNED,” and audiences are far more prepared to attend to and be affected by unplanned ones because the latter cannot be dismissed as “routine” while the former are typically viewed that way. 

            “It is no accident,” the political analyst says, that the most powerful of all Putin addresses occurred immediately after the annexation of Crimea.” From the point of view, that was out of the ordinary, and therefore they were affected by it in profound ways. The search for novelty is thus a search for something that will generate support.

            But Putin has a problem: he has been in power “already 19 years. For a significant majority of the population, he has ceased to be news.” Russians are ready to dismiss his remarks because they have heard it all before; and his supporters listen only to be reassured that nothing has changed or will.

            Given all these factors, Gallyamov says, it is “somewhat naïve” to hope that the decline in Putin’s ratings is going to be affected positively or negatively by any single speech, unless and until he has something really new to announce.