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Opinion
December 15, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 19
One telling flag to watch out for in 2018 is whether Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is re- placed. Medvedev has been a useful placeholder during Putin’s current term, but his total subservi- ence to Putin has in effect moved political power out of the Duma and into the presidential appara- tus. If deep structural reforms are to be effected then the full apparatus of government will be needed to debate and enforce the changes. And that means a new prime minister to lead the effort.
While the polls show the propensity to protest remains very low, smaller interest groups, like those supporting anti-corruption blogger and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, are becoming increasingly vocal.
Navalny has been touring the country all year and brought thousands onto the streets in each of the regional capitals he has visited. While Navalny will almost certainly be barred from running in the elections (thanks to a criminal conviction that is widely seen as politically motivated) and polls below 2%, the rallies are an education that show the people they can protest and can criticise the Kremlin. Democracy is still very new to the Rus- sians and they are still not clear about the power of their vote and how they can wield that power.
All this makes the introduction of a realistic and effective economic reform plan imperative. While a lot of preparatory work has been done, it is still not clear if a plan will be implemented or if the status quo will be maintained.
The people themselves are split over the need for radical reform. A recent survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that in general the poor want radical change while the middle classes see the need for change but want it to be gradual. Surprisingly the least keen on radical change were the young (around 24 years old). The upshot is the new reform plan is very likely to be a fudge.
In the last three years the top priority for the Kremlin became modernising the army to check
the perceived external military threat. Oddly enough the need for this investment into the armed forces was vindicated to an extent. In
a speech at the Munich Security Conference
in 2007, Putin famously accused the west of breaking a promise to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand Nato eastward — a claim Nato has strenuously denied and dismissed as a “myth”.
Newly declassified documents published this week fully vindicate Putin’s claim and show that Gorbachev was promised many times by many leaders there would be no Nato expansion, but nothing was ever put on paper.
Economic reform was put on hold during the army modernisation, but that process is coming to an end. Putin boasted “No one remembers that in the 90s we were in a civil war and young men were sent to the front line. But fast forward to today and we have a strong army.”
Headline defence spending has been cut from over 4% of GDP in the 2018-2020 budget, although in terms of share of GDP it is still 2.8% of GDP, more than the 2% of GDP Nato members are supposed to spend. Putin also declared victory in Russia’s Syrian campaign against Islamic State (IS) last week and announced a Russian pull
out. All this was possible thanks to the military reforms, Putin claimed.
Few details on what a potential reform plan would look like have been released, but Putin dropped
a few hints.
Currently there are two big plans on the table. Former finance minister and co-head of the presidential council Alexei Kudrin leads one camp and is calling for investments into economic multipliers such as infrastructure, social services, education, health and above all improving labour productivity. The other camp is championed by presidential Ombudsman for Business Boris Titov and the Stolypin Club that are calling for massive borrowing and massive spending in a New Deal style policy to kickstart economic growth.