PRIME MINISTER Vladimir Putin has pledged to overhaul Russian democracy to make government more responsive to society’s demands, in an apparent bid to defuse protests against his 12-year rule and his plan to return to the presidency next month.
Critics dismissed yesterday’s newspaper article, in which Mr Putin made his proposals, and which came two days after tens of thousands of people marched through Moscow to denounce Mr Putin and his allies’ alleged rigging of December’s parliamentary election, outnumbering a rival rally of his supporters.
"Today our society is totally different to how it was in the early 2000s. Many people are becoming better-off, better educated and more demanding," Mr Putin wrote in the Kommersantnewspaper.
“Today the quality of the state is lagging behind the readiness of civil society to take part in it. Our civil society has become incomparably more mature, active and responsible. We need to renew the mechanisms of our democracy.”
Recalling the poverty, chaos and corruption of the 1990s, Mr Putin argued that he had brought stability to Russia and fostered the growth of a middle class – the very people who now regularly protest against him.
In a fourth long campaign article that was short on specifics, Mr Putin said parliament should be obliged to discuss any proposal that was supported by 100,000 signatures online – an apparent sop to the internet-savvy opposition – and he reiterated plans to reintroduce the direct election of regional governors, which he scrapped in 2004.
Having accused his opponents of being paid by foreign states, Mr Putin did insist that “real democracy is not created in an instant and cannot be copied from a foreign model”.
He also warned against turning politics into “a circus” and stressed the need to retain a “strong, effective and respected federal centre”.
Lilia Shevtsova of the Moscow Carnegie Centre said Mr Putin’s proposals were “cosmetic and simply tactical concessions, they do not contain any real movement”.
Leading opposition activist Alexei Navalny said Mr Putin’s claim to be able to crush corruption because he had “sorted out the oligarchs” would be particularly laughable to tycoons like the Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich.
“Abramovich probably choked on his champagne when he read that,” wrote Mr Navalny.
“And then he laughed for a long time, slapping his thighs and tossing truffles at his servant.”