Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 12 – By announcing the
end of the days off he gave to Russians earlier to promote self-isolation,
Vladimir Putin shows that he is trying to recover the initiative so that he can
hold the referendum on the constitutional amendments this summer and again be
creating events rather than responding to them, Ilya Grashchenkov and Maksim
Zharov say.
By ending his order, Putin is not
ending the self-isolation regime but rather putting pressure on the governors
to do so, Grashchenkov, the head of the Center for the Development of Regional
Policy, says, so that the Kremlin leader can have the constitutional referendum
sometime between June 15 and July 15 (realtribune.ru/news/authority/4245).
Had he not taken this otherwise
inexplicable action, the regional specialist says, the pressure to keep the
stay at home order in place until August or later would have been hard to
overcome, and Putin would have begun to lose support from among those who are
ready to vote for the amendments – government employees, single mothers, and
pensioners.
And so, in order to move the vote
up, Putin has reclaimed control over the administration of the country. Had he
waited any longer, Grashchenkov says, there would have been the danger that
those who want to keep the self-isolation regime would have dominated and prevented
the vote that Putin very much wants.
Zharov, a Moscow political
technologist, agrees. By making this announcement now, he says, Putin is
seeking to be in control of events rather than be controlled by them.
Otherwise, the timing of his statement makes no sense because the number of coronavirus
cases is still increasing.
But Putin’s timing means something
else too, Zharov says. “The fight against the epidemic has sent into overtime
the prematurely begun ‘transit of power’” and that in turn suggests that “the
time at which the country will escape the epidemic will be determined” not by
medical news but by political concerns.
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