Peter Spinella -
One day after the 20th anniversary of Vladimir Putin coming to power in Russia, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in central Moscow to attend the largest opposition rally in half a decade.
Saturday’s protest was the fourth in as many weeks. The protest movement has ostensibly focused on the political opposition’s right to join municipal races, after several candidates were rejected from a ballot for upcoming city council elections in Moscow.
Yet a clear undercurrent that drives the protests forward is increasing opposition to Russia’s federal leadership under Putin.
“These protests are also against Putin,” one of the rejected candidates, Alexander Solovyev, who represents the human rights and pro-democracy group Open Russia, said.
“Only the masses can influence the government. It’s possible to change something if people will continue to rally,” Solovyev said.
Protests are planned for every weekend ahead of the September 8 elections in Moscow, but Solovyev admitted he was unsure the wave could continue to maintain its momentum after the vote.
The next major election is in two years. Putin’s current term as president lasts another five.
“Obviously these protests are not only about the local elections,” said one protester, Svetlana, who requested anonymity. “They are the natural outcome of the growing general dissatisfaction with the deplorable state of affairs in the country and, of course, the president.”
Putin, who has served as either president or prime minister since 1999, won re-election last year in a landslide, with about three-quarters of the official vote count, and was inaugurated to his fourth term as president.
His personal approval ratings remain strong, at nearly 70 per cent, according to a survey last month by Russia’s largest independent pollster, Levada Centre.
This outward backing of the president does not translate into support for his broader administration, however. Another Levada Centre poll last week revealed a resoundingly negative view of Russia’s government.
Nearly half the respondents, 41 per cent, described it as “criminal and corrupt.” Other widely chosen characteristics in the multiple-choice poll included “far from the people” (31 per cent),”bureaucratic” (24 per cent) and “short-sighted” (19 per cent).
Only 15 per cent of respondents indicated that they think the current government is lawful.
About the same percentage who approve of Putin disapprove of his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, who last year announced one of the government’s most widely detested manoeuvres in recent decades: raising the retirement age by five years to beyond the average lifespan for Russian men.
The current wave of protests is not necessarily about Putin himself, but about his “increasingly dysfunctional and inefficient system” known as “Putinism,” political expert Mark Galeotti said.
Putin’s system “tries to exclude opposition rather than address the issues it raises,” said Galeotti, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defence and security think tank.
Galeotti said the authorities should have allowed the opposition candidates onto the Moscow ballot — and then could still have marginalized and ignored them once in office.
“This is a needless fight and a mistake — and a decision, I think, that came more from the presidential administration than the mayor’s office,” Galeotti said.
Russian political expert Anna Arutunyan agreed that authorities miscalculated: “They saw the city council positions being filled by independents as significant enough to be an inconvenience, but not significant enough for the opposition to fight over.”
— dpa
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