Page 52 - bne_Magazine_June_2017

52 Opinion
Putin's main
weakness is voters' passivity
Natalia Antonova in Moscow
In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has emerged as the great antagonist of the West – whether for meddling in Western elections, grabbing Crimea, starting an undeclared war in east Ukraine, or supporting the murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad – but the Western view of him is often very contradictory, especially right now.
On the one hand, journalists and pundits want to see Putin’s government as perpetually on the brink of collapse. After all, Putin is seen as ruling Russia with an iron fist. He oppresses his own people, and even if his popularity ratings don’t reflect that, the people are bound to catch on eventually. The spectre of the Russian Revolution – which turns one hundred years old later this year – is vivid in the Western imagination. Just like doomsday preachers calling on people to repent because the Rapture is due any day now, we eagerly seize
on any and all signs that Putin’s government is beginning to crumble.
Yet on the other hand, we’re tempted to cast Putin as an all- powerful supervillain, a guy who can effortlessly compromise a future US president, a guy capable of “weaponizing” refugees in order to destroy Europe – among his many other evil genius moves.
Which version of Putin is real? Certainly both versions
have some truth to them. A government whose chief authority rests on the shoulders of one man is by nature fragile. Not to mention the fact that as a recent poll revealed, only 48% of Russians say they intend to vote for the man in 2018. At the same time, the same poll revealed that only 22% of Russians would like someone other than Putin to win. In conjunction with Putin’s high approval rating, it has become obvious that support among Russians for Putin is more passive than active. The majority have no problem with saying they approve of their president, but physically checking his name off on the ballot means taking approval to a different level, and is thus a different matter.
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It’s easy to see how an intelligent ex-KGB officer is automatically transformed into a suave, deadly version of Dr Evil in the popular imagination abroad.
Putin is certainly capable of exploiting problems in the United States and the EU – and even better at terrorising Russia’s neighbours – and then turning around and using these crises to raise Russia’s prestige with his domestic audience. This in conjunction with Putin’s ability to throw sizeable enough crumbs to the general population during
“The majority have no problem with saying they approve of their president, but physically checking his name off on the ballot means taking approval to a different level”
Russia’s oil boom has for years been a winning strategy. Perhaps it doesn’t take genius, but it certainly takes intelligence. And it’s therefore easy to see how an intelligent ex-KGB officer is automatically transformed into a suave, deadly version of Dr Evil in the popular imagination abroad.
Perhaps in order to better understand Putin one should see him through the eyes of his most prominent antagonist, anti- corruption crusader Alexey Navalny.
Navalny doesn’t build up Putin as a mighty Goliath, preferring to speak about him in a sardonic tone. Perhaps more importantly, Navalny has focused his recent protest efforts not on Putin, but on Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a much less popular figure. This chimes with the way that the protest agenda in Russia has been taken over by more localised, less abstract concerns – be they road taxes or a controversial plan to get rid of a sizeable portion of Moscow’s post-war housing.
In many ways, protesters and protest leaders have woken up to