Peter Spinella -
Russian President Vladimir Putin faces tough times ahead if a slight boost in the rouble’s value does not translate into a rise in real incomes for the country’s populace, despite the Russian leader’s rising power in global affairs, analysts warn.
Putin’s approval ratings, while remaining above 60 per cent, have fallen some 20 percentage points from a high they enjoyed during a nationalistic surge following Russia’s annexation of neighbouring Ukraine’s Crimea region five years ago.
The post-Crimea high came despite a slump in the rouble, blamed back then on crippling Western sanctions following the annexation. But the rouble’s problems have lingered, creating prolonged economic hardship that has exposed cracks in the broad support for Putin, who has been in power as president or prime minister for two decades.
“Domestically the Kremlin is faced with a chronically stagnant economy. The lack of growth is due to systemic issues that go beyond the Western sanctions,” regional expert Diyar Autal said.
Real household income per capita has declined for most of the past six years.
“Putin did not deliver this year, and is unlikely to be delivering in the years to come, on people’s key expectation of improving standards of living,” said Autal, an associate of Harvard University’s Davis Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Midsummer protests - prompted when several prominent opposition politicians were disallowed from running in local elections in the capital, Moscow - transformed into a broad anti-government movement that swept across the country.
It was the largest such movement since Putin reclaimed the presidency, after a stint in the premiership, in 2012.
A recent nationwide survey by Russia’s largest independent pollster revealed that most Russian young adults up to 24 years old want to permanently move abroad. It was the highest percentage in a decade.
“Putin had no specific goals domestically in 2019,” said Russian political expert Ivan Kurilla. “Putin was safely re-elected in 2018, there is still a long way to the next presidential election in 2024, and nothing serious for Putin’s power was at stake.”
“The level of protests was insufficient to provide a real challenge to his rule, but made his subordinates, like Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin or security apparatus heads, nervous,” said Kurilla, an international relations professor at the European University in St Petersburg.
More than two-thirds of Russians believe that their government does not act in the people’s interest, according to another recent survey by the respected independent pollster, Levada Centre.
Lacking domestic goals, Putin appeared to be seeking a breakthrough in foreign relations, Kurilla said. This was a departure from the defensive policies that took precedence amid the 2014 Crimea annexation.
“Since 2014, Putin’s foreign policy was defensive, but, in 2019, it started looking like an attempt to get rid of international isolation and sanctions,” Kurilla said.
After Russia was cleared of some US election conspiracy charges in the Mueller Report, Putin invited top US diplomat Mike Pompeo to Sochi. “We can assume Putin had some hopes that US-Russian relations would significantly improve,” Kurilla said.
“At the first glance, it seems that foreign relations this year were better for Putin than in previous years, while domestic politics were more problematic,” Kurilla said.
“But foreign policy was not a big success because there was no real breakthrough,” Kurilla said. — dpa
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