Page 17 - bne_newspaper_August_02_2019

Opinion
August 2, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 17
MACRO ADVISER:
August in Russia: What could possibly go wrong?
Chris Weafer of Macro-Advisory
On Christmas Day on e has the Queen’s speech and on Easter Day it is the Pope’s Urbi et Orbi; traditional messages with a familiar theme.
In Russia, it has become a late July tradition amongst Russia watchers to remind ourselves that August is the month when unusual and trend changing events take place more often than in any other month of the year. If one needs a reminder, it was twenty years ago, on August 9 1999, that Vladimir Putin was former president Boris Yeltsin’s surprise choice to be his prime minister. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history. What may we expect this year?
The most obvious threat to an uneventful August is of an escalation in the political protests which could then evolve to broader social protests, much as we saw in late 2011 when the protests against alleged vote rigging in the Duma elections created a catalyst for ordinary Muscovites to vent their frustration at corruption and poor social services. What started as a containable political protest quickly evolved into a several hundred thousand strong (at weekends) protest camp just across the river from the Kremlin. The administration will be very keen to avoid a repeat but will clearly have to thread very carefully.
Over the past two weekends, there have been protests in Moscow over the blocking of several candidates to take part in the September 8 local municipal elections. But political protests are not, in themselves, a big deal or anything
that the government usually worries too much about. Such protests are regularly allowed as a mechanism to allow the 20-25% of the population, who oppose the government, to blow off steam. Most of these protests are also well covered by the Russian media so that the Kremlin can show the population that A) it is tolerant of protest
and B) that such protests are relatively small and represent only a small percentage of the population. The problem arises when that second assumption comes under threat.
The danger for the government is that these political, and local, protests come against a backdrop of broader public dissatisfaction with the performance of government and with the trend in the economy. Independent opinion polls, such as those regularly produced by the Levada Center, show that more people are, today, willing to take part in protests to express frustration
with poor economic performance and poor social services, such as in healthcare and housing. As was seen in December 2011, the real danger for the Kremlin is that relatively unimportant political protests can quickly change to something a lot more serious and threatening.
The other threat to watch is the huge forest fire in Siberia. According to the Federal Forestry Agency, more than 2.7mn hectares of remote forest is currently burning across six Siberian and Far East regions, an area roughly equal to the size of Belgium. The smoke from those fires is steadily