Will Putin's Fifth Term Herald a New Political Age for Russia?

Moscow: Few Russian leaders have lasted as long or wrought more profound and permanent changes on this huge country than Vladimir Putin. The fresh six-year term overwhelmingly handed to him by Russian voters on Sunday looks likely to be his most challenging yet and – under Russia's current constitution – should be his last.

Almost two decades in power, Putin has defied regular predictions of his political demise, and re-invented himself more than once. As he steps into what will be effectively his fifth term in office, he will need to do so again. Today's Russia, with all of its strengths and flaws, is very much the product of Putin's priorities. Especially amid tensions and isolation of recent years, it has proven far more resilient than critics at home and abroad ever expected, while the once commonplace forecasts of doom have become a greatly devalued currency.

It will now fall to Putin himself to confront the serious problems that his own choices have instigated. These include deep alienation from the West, which grows worse by the day, with the accompanying deprivation of Western finance and technology that Russian businesses had earlier relied on; economic stagnation that has so far resisted all Putin's pledges of reform; and a top-heavy and corrupt bureaucracy.

Perhaps most crucial of all, he needs to develop a plan to prepare Russia for life without Putin.

Putin's easy re-election

The election that reaffirmed Putin's dominance is a relatively new innovation in the history of Russia, where dynasties, revolutions and politburos traditionally ensconced the top man. There was no suspense about the outcome because it was not an exercise in free and fair political competition.

But neither was it meaningless. Seven competitors, representing a real spectrum of opposition viewpoints, had the opportunity to express themselves more-or-less freely during the campaign, although Putin never deigned to debate them directly. Their purpose is not merely decorative. The Kremlin will pay close attention to the vote totals achieved by each, and probably take special note the nearly 14% won by Communist candidate Pavel Grudinin, about twice his expected total. Grudinin, who runs a former state farm on Moscow's outskirts, is a new face for the old Communist Party, and his showing will be read as evidence that socialist ideas retain strong attraction for at least a segment of Russian voters.

Like other Putin-era elections, this one was rigorously stage-managed by the Kremlin, with state media creating a sense of inevitability around him, the lavish allocation of state resources to support him, and the removal of potentially disruptive rivals like Alexei Navalny from the ballot in advance.

The main factor that ensured Putin's easy re-election, however, was his undeniable popularity among Russians. It may be little appreciated in the West, and only reluctantly conceded by Putin's domestic opponents, but the former KGB colonel inherited a country on the verge of collapse 18 years ago. He re-united it under strong central power, oversaw a decade of strong economic growth that spread a semblance of prosperity throughout much of the society, weaned Russia from dependence on Western financial institutions and advice, rebuilt the military, and gave Russians a sense of being citizens of a great power once more.

"Putin has proven himself to be the right person for Russia, over and over again," says Sergei Markov, director of the independent Institute of Political Studies and a former Kremlin adviser. "Of course he made a lot of mistakes, and he has a lot of problems facing his next term. But people in the West don't understand how Russians view him. He isn't comparable to his contemporaries, like Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron or Donald Trump. We can already see that he is a giant of Russian history, something like our FDR or Charles de Gaulle."

Putin and the world

The most acute and potentially dangerous feature of Putin's previous six-year term was the disastrous collapse of relations with the United States and the West in general. The worst phase began, ironically, amid Putin's most ambitious attempt to win Western acceptance and respect by staging the ultra-expensive 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. As the Games were winding up, pro-Europe street protesters in Kiev overthrew Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. That prompted Putin to order the annexation of Russian-populated Crimea, and to sponsor a still-ongoing pro-Russian rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

In response the West levied tough sanctions against Moscow, which continue to escalate. The world has endured a seemingly endless train of unprecedented diplomatic crises, including sanctions and embassy expulsions over Russia's alleged interference in US elections, Olympic doping scandals and, most recently, a harrowing scandal around the nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian double agent in Britain. The atmosphere, already more acrimonious than the old Cold War, seems set to worsen.

Through all this the Russian public has stood by Putin; indeed, his 77% showing in the election, with a voter turnout near 70%, speaks eloquently to that. Russians seem to appreciate his defiance of Western pressure, and there is no sign of them abandoning him.

Yet, there is no doubt that Russia has been boxed-in by his choices. Confrontation with the West was the downfall of the former USSR, and many Russian experts fret that that ongoing sanctions may gradually bury Russia's hopes of modernising its economy by absorbing cutting-edge Western technologies and integrating with world markets. The Kremlin has made much of plans for a "pivot to Asia" as an alternative to Western engagement, and that may yet change the face of global geopolitics, but it remains a largely a complicated work-in-progress.

"Relations with the West took a turn that Putin didn't expect, and he has probably underestimated its long-term consequences," says Nikolai Petrov, an expert at Moscow's Higher School of Economics. "He didn't anticipate the outcry over the annexation of Crimea. He may have hoped that the election of Donald Trump would set things right, but that definitely didn't happen. Putin is a person who likes to keep all his options open, but these changes look irreversible. That is going to haunt his next term."

Some experts say Putin sidelined economic reform after 2014 in order to deal with the international crisis. He has certainly succeeded in fending off the double-whammy of Western sanctions and falling oil prices. The Russian economy actually bounced back from recession last year, growing by about 2%.

"The problem is that the growth we are experiencing is the result of state intervention, not organic private sector growth," says Andrei Kolesnikov, an expert with the Moscow Carnegie Centre. "The state is everywhere in the economy. That limits the prospects for future growth and reinforces authoritarianism in the political sphere. State capitalism cannot exist without political control. Economic monopoly requires political monopoly.

"Putin's approach in his next term will be to create a more technocratic elite; appoint people who are younger, more efficient in his eyes. He will try to do it without fundamentally reforming the system, and that means the economic stagnation will continue," he says.

The last six years have seen relatively few upsurges of social discontent, though there have been some warning signals. But Kremlin plans to implement pension and tax reforms in order to increase state revenue create more uncertainty about the future.

"After the election we will be heading into a period of intense social reforms, and the likelihood of popular push-back will increase," says Petrov. "Police forces around the country are being re-trained and re-equipped, so it seems that authorities are expecting this."

Handling the succession

The biggest uncertainty by far revolves around Putin's plans for handling the succession, a critical question that he has so far failed to address. Both on the grounds of his advancing age – he will be 72 in 2024 – and the Russian Constitution's limitation of a president to two consecutive terms, some hard decisions will have to be made. Many Russian analysts are predicting that he will move to amend the constitution, perhaps to enshrine a Chinese-style "president for life" model.

"Putin is going to be a lame duck for the next six years and that means that elites will be scheming and struggling [over the succession] for all that time," says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Russia's leading expert on the country's shifting elites.

"It takes a generational form, with older groups wanting Putin to stay in some way, because everything they have depends on him. Younger people want reforms, a change of the guard, upward mobility for themselves. Putin is still able to be the arbiter of this, but as the question of succession becomes more acute, the struggle will intensify," she says.

"This has happened many times before in Russian history. The long reign of a czar ends, and is followed by turmoil, a war of all against all. We need to avoid this nightmare, and I hope that Putin understands that."

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