Vladimir Putin’s success in claiming a fifth six-year term puts him on track to surpass Joseph Stalin as the longest-serving Russian leader in modern times.
The incumbent president won 87% of the vote in a tightly controlled election that ended on Sunday. Putin said the result represented a desire for “internal consolidation” that would allow Russia to “act effectively at the front line” in the UK war and in other spheres such as the economy.
The election, the first since the invasion was launched in February 2022, was designed to “both create a public mandate for the war and restore Putin’s image as the embodiment of stability”, said The New York Times (NYT). “Still, Russians are somewhat edgy over what changes the vote might bring.”
What did the commentators say?
“Putin 5.0 may not be so different from Putin 4.0,” said the BBC‘s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg. Don’t expect an “Abracadabra moment”, where “with a wave of a magic wand, the hawk suddenly turns into a dove”. Instead, the “chances are” that Putin will “continue along his current path of conflict abroad and crackdown at home”.
With high-profile opposition figures such as Alexei Navalny and former Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin both dead, Putin’s new mandate sends a clear message to Russia’s political elite.
In a pre-election interview with Kremlin propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, the president remained coy about whether a government shake-up could be on the cards. But he has hinted that war veterans should form the core of a “new elite” to run the country. That proposal is “expected to accelerate a trend of public officials expressing muscular patriotism”, said the NYT, “especially as Putin seeks to replace his older allies with a younger generation”.
Independent polling in January found that 83% of Russians wanted their government to focus on domestic affairs. But, with an estimated 40% of public expenditure going towards military spending, the war in Ukraine has become a “central organising principle” of the economy and Putin’s rule, said Newsweek.
Putin has rejected as “complete nonsense” claims by Joe Biden that he has his eye on other countries after Ukraine. But it is “unclear what the Russian leader might try to present to his people as a victory if the war stops”, said the news site. He has already indicated that any attempt to involve Nato troops on the ground in Ukraine could trigger an all-out war with the West, and even nuclear escalation.
His fourth term may have been defined by the invasion of Ukraine and quashing of political competition at home but, said the Financial Times (FT), “a fifth term for Putin is a threat to Europe, and the world”.
What next?
The period after any presidential election is when the Kremlin “habitually introduces unpopular policies”, said the NYT. After the 2018 vote, for example, Putin raised the retirement age, sparking some of the largest public protests seen during his 25 years in office. This time round, “Russians are speculating about whether a new military mobilisation or increased domestic repression could be around the corner”.
The Russian leader has, in the short term, “sanction-proofed his economy”, said CNN. “His ammunition factories are outproducing the US and its European allies and the political landscape has been cleared of all competition.”
But war is “always unpredictable”, the site added. “And whatever Putin’s efforts to spin things in his favour, Russia’s longer-term problems – demographic decline, the cost of war and sanctions, and the inherent brittleness of one-man rule – are not likely to disappear before Putin stands for a sixth term in office.”
The long-term damage from lasting sanctions and losing Western markets for Russian energy will be “immense”, said the FT. But the ultimate “failure of his misbegotten war remains the one thing most likely to prevent his fifth term from extending into a sixth”.
Winning 87% of the votes, said the BBC’s Rosenberg, is also “a great confidence booster”. But “critics point out that political confidence in a leader – especially over-confidence – can be dangerous”. This is especially true “in the absence of checks and balances in a country’s political system”, and “there are few of those in today’s Russia”.