ANALYSIS - RUSSIA

Putin and his presidential puppet

Thursday 08 May 2008

There’s no question about it. Even a cursory dip into the Russian constitution is sufficient to understand that in Russia the president is boss. Except that he isn’t – at least not when Vladimir Putin is prime minister.

Quite how this latest reincarnation of dual power in Russia is going to work out, no one is quite sure. But for the moment the arrangement appears to suit both Dmitry Medvedev and Putin, although Russia’s Kommersant newspaper said on Thursday that the outgoing president looked stunned by the dawning realization that his term was really over.   Putin, it said, looked like he had aged by the eight years of his presidency in an instant.

 

Not that the 42-year-old Medvedev looked any better.    The face of the new man with the finger on Russia’s nuclear button was ashen white as he contemplated the enormity of the responsibility now sitting on his slender shoulders.

 

Which does rather suggest that he won’t be too unhappy if Vladimir continues to call most of the shots – at least to begin with.

 

Despite his short stint as deputy prime minister, Medvedev has little experience of politics and has no real power base of his own.   Indeed, he owes his meteoric rise to the presidency almost solely to the patronage of Vladimir Putin.   Even if he wanted to strike out in a new direction, the hard truth is that he couldn’t.

 

Small changes, then bigger?

 

At most, we should anticipate nuanced change in the year ahead.    It is said that Medvedev is more liberal and less abrasive than Putin.   In his inauguration speech, he spoke of the need for civil and economic freedom and for reform of the judiciary.    It’s unlikely he would have said this unless he had his predecessor’s backing.   So, after Putin’s “dictatorship of the law”, perhaps we will see a shift in emphasis.   Perhaps Russians may even start to dream of the possibility of an independent judiciary – though few will be holding their breath.

 

What next though for the new prime minister, who was voted in unanimously by parliament, with one abstention?   Putin looked strangely out of place in the utilitarian surroundings of the Russian parliament – somehow diminished by the absence of all that Kremlin pomp and splendour.  

 

You could sense though that the deputies were invigorated by his presence.    Nobody remembers now the outgoing prime minister, Viktor Zubkov, who has returned to the obscurity from which he emerged last year.   He was a nobody whose lack of substance underlined the marginalization of parliament.    Putin though is a very different kettle of fish and his leadership of the Duma may breathe new life into a neglected institution.

 

The big question though is how long can the Medvedev-Putin relationship stay cosy?    For the moment, Medvedev will be happy to let Putin call the shots but as he grows into the job, makes his own appointments, figures out who his allies are and who his enemies, expect that to change – even if only incrementally at first.    The Russian constitution confers enormous power on the president and two years down the road, Putin may begin to remember that.