WITH SIX months to go before presidential elections, Russia’s political class continues to be captivated by the “2012 problem”: the decision between Dmitry Medvedev, the president, and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, on which one of them will take part in, and presumably win, the contest.
At this weekend’s annual congress of United Russia, the hegemonic political party run by Mr Putin, experts are expecting some more clues, if not an outright announcement on succession. A Kremlin official said that if the announcement did not happen there, it would most probably not be made until after parliamentary elections on December 4th. Consensus is growing among casual observers and political experts alike that Mr Putin, considered the politically stronger of the two men, will return to the post he occupied for two terms but gave up to his protégé Mr Medvedev in 2007 because of a constitutional limit on his term.
Few have failed to notice that Mr Medvedev does not appear to be campaigning. He has said he would like a second term, though he seems to be relying entirely on the goodwill of Mr Putin – whose own wishes are not known – rather than trying to campaign on his own and carve a separate political identity.
Meanwhile, Mr Putin has increased his efforts to get on to television, doing his annual August photo shoot in scuba-diving gear, and taking centre stage when ExxonMobil and Rosneft signed a historic deal to develop Arctic Sea oil reserves.
An August poll by the Levada Centre, the Moscow sociological research agency, showed that 41 per cent of the 1,600 Russians polled believed Mr Putin would return as president, up from 38 per cent in January. Of those polled 22 per cent thought Mr Medvedev would return, down from 30 per cent in January.
Paddy Power, the UK betting website, has even started taking wagers on the issue, giving odds that put Mr Putin as 7.9 times more likely to win.
Other scenarios, considered less likely, are that they will run against each other, or that they will name a compromise third figure as the candidate. The decision, according to several insiders, was supposed to be made in August, though it was thought that the two men would wait to inform anyone of it until they saw fit. However, according to Gleb Pavlovsky, formerly a political consultant to the Kremlin, the waiting has begun to make people nervous.
“The longer they wait, the more I think there is some game going on between them,” he said.
In the absence of a clear signal from above, however, Russia’s command-and-control-style bureaucracy remains paralysed. “No strategic decisions are being made at the moment because of the uncertainty,” said a senior Moscow-based banker.
Analysts are split on whether what they are in fact witnessing is a behind-the-scenes political struggle, or a carefully scripted simulation of politics that has become the norm under a decade of Putin rule, where moves are carefully choreographed.
Journalists have been treated to a number of off-the-record briefings recently with senior officials, who have done their best to spin for one or the other of the candidates, giving a collective impression that nothing has yet been decided. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)