27 February 2012
Putin’s Pyrrhic Victory?
By Gwynne Dyer
Vladimir Putin is going to win the presidential election in Russia on 4 March. In theory, that gives him six more years in power, and the right to run for a further six-year term after that. (He got around the constitutional ban on more than two consecutive terms as president by spending the past four years as prime minister.) But it’s very unlikely that Putin will be ruling Russia twelve years from now.
So far, anti-Putin demonstrations are strictly a big-city phenomenon. Elsewhere, many if not most people still believe that the near-universal corruption is an abuse of Putin’s system, not an intrinsic part of it. They also buy his argument that only he can protect Russia from nefarious foreign plots and bring prosperity to the majority of Russians who still struggle to make ends meet.
The latest opinion poll predicts that Putin will win 66 percent of the votes cast on Sunday, but he’s lucky that the presidential election is happening now and not a year from now, because his support is eroding fast. People are losing their fear of his regime, and the corruption issue is biting deeper and deeper.
The recent street demonstrations in Russia’s big cities are important, but the occasional outbreaks of open mockery of Putin in the media are an even better indication of which way the wind is blowing. A case in point is Ksenia Sobchak, one of Russia’s most popular bloggers, whose television talk show, “Where Is Putin Taking Us?” was cancelled after the first episode because she invited protest leader Alexei Navalny on the show.
She struck back with a video mocking celebrities who have recorded messages endorsing Putin’s election campaign. It opens with a close-up of a rather bedraggled looking Ms Sobchak earnestly urging Russians to vote for Putin. “Now is not the time to rock the boat and we should rally round one leader,” she concludes, the producer shouts “cut” – and the camera pulls back to show that she is tied to a chair and flanked by armed guards.
Mockery is an effective weapon because it undercuts people’s fear of speaking out, but it’s the corruption that is really damaging Putin’s standing. The corruption is not personal: Putin made his pile in the first few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as amply documented in Masha Gessen’s brave and meticulously researched new book “The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin”. He has no need to steal any more.
However, turning a blind eye to corruption has become the main way that Putin’s regime gains and keeps collaborators. As one of his ex-KGB former collaborators from St Petersburg, Viktor Cherkesov, told the Spanish newspaper El Pais last October, “Putin doesn’t pay much attention to theft, because he reckons everyone steals.”
Most people who work for his regime do indeed steal – but the public IS paying attention, and slowly but surely it is drawing conclusions even in the slumbering heartlands of Russia.
Putin lives in fear of another “colour” revolution like the Orange one that swept away the former Ukrainian regime or the Rose Revolution in Georgia, but when the time comes in Russia it won’t take a revolution to change things. The country is already a democracy in form, and to a certain extent in substance too. Putin actually has to get elected, and he can only go so far in trying to bend electoral outcomes to his will.
For twelve years Putin has ruled Russia almost without challenge, partly because of his macho image – a “street-fighting, motherland-loving tough guy”, as one observer put it – and partly because he has overseen a dramatic recovery in Russian living standards. The steep rise in oil prices was responsible for much of that, and anyway it would have been hard to do worse than the previous government under Boris Yeltsin, but Putin does get the credit for it.
His tough-guy image still appeals to some Russian voters, but it is getting old. The economy, for global reasons largely beyond Putin’s control, is no longer producing dramatic growth. As a result United Russia, Putin’s own party, fell below 50 percent of the votes for the first time since its foundation in last December’s parliamentary election.
It might have fallen even further if not for large-scale fraud in the counting of the votes. That fraud triggered the first major public protests in Russia since Putin came to power, and the regime has already been forced to retreat on several fronts. Regional governors will once again be elected directly (Putin was appointing them instead), and it will become significantly easier to register new political parties in Russia.
Putin is demagogic, cunning and ruthless, but he is not actually a dictator and his regime is more fragile than it looks. If it loses popular support, the question is not whether it will also lose power, but only when. Will Russians be willing to wait six years until the next scheduled presidential election, or will they find a (hopefully legal) way to push him out a good deal sooner?
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 2 and 10. (“So…meet”; and “For…it”)
30 January 2012
The Syrian Tragedy
By Gwynne Dyer
“The Security Council cannot go about imposing solutions in crisis situations in various countries of the world,” said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, as the UN began discussing what to do about the Syrian crisis last Friday. He needn’t worry. Even as Syria drifts inexorably towards a catastrophic civil war, nobody else is willing to put troops into the country, so how are they going to impose anything?
You can’t blame them for their reluctance, because Syria isn’t Libya. It is a big country with a powerful army, the core of which will remain loyal to the Assad regime right down to the last ditch. A good 30 percent of the civilian population will join them in the ditch: the Alawites (Shia), the Christians, and some of the Kurds and Druze, all of whom fear that the overthrow of the regime will put the Sunni Arab majority in the driving seat.
That’s where they should be, of course – they are at more than 70 percent of the population – but when revolutions triumphed recently in Tunisia and Egypt, the subsequent elections brought explicitly Islamic parties to parties. There’s no evidence that those parties will actually abuse the civil rights of minorities, but given the increasingly sectarian nature of the struggle in Syria, the minorities there are frightened by the prospect of Sunni power.
So the minorities will stick with President Bashar al-Assad no matter what his forces do to the Sunnis, and there are enough of them, given the regime’s virtual monopoly of heavy weapons, to hold out against either domestic insurgency or foreign military intervention for a long time. That’s why there won’t be any foreign military intervention.
But it’s getting worse in Syria. Several suburbs of Damascus itself have now fallen into rebel hands, and Assad’s forces are shelling neighbourhoods only 5 km. (3 mi.) from the centre of the city. Since last March, about 5,400 people have been killed by the regime’s military and paramilitary troops, and the 200 observers sent by the Arab League in December didn’t even slow the rate of killing.
In desperation, the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission last week and called for Bashar al-Assad to hand over power to a deputy within two weeks. That deputy would then be obliged to form a unity government with the opposition within two months. In other words, it demanded the end of the regime.
In fact, the Arab League has even drafted a joint resolution with Britain, France and Germany that threatens unspecified further measures against the Syrian regime if Assad does not step aside. Nabil al-Arabi, the head of the Arab League, is in New York this week to present it to the Security Council in person.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Syrian regime has already rejected the Arab League’s demand, insisting that what’s really happening in Syria is attacks by “armed terrorist gangs” (i.e. al-Qaeda) backed by Israel and the United States. Ridiculous, but a lot of Alawites and Christians actually believe it.
The worse news is that Russia will veto the resolution before the Security Council anyway. Assad is Moscow’s only real ally in the Middle East, and Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean is on the Syrian coast. Bad Moscow – but the truth is that foreign military intervention would probably not stop the killing at this point unless it was truly massive. That wouldn’t happen even with a dozen Security Council resolutions.
The worst news of all is that this probably means that Syria is heading down into the same kind of hell that Lebanon went through in its fifteen-year civil war (1975-90).
It has just gone on too long. The Syrian protests began as a brave attempt to emulate the non-violent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The Assad regime would kill people, of course, but if the protesters stood fast and refused to kill back, ultimately the regime’s support would just drain away. Non-violence was doubly important in the Syrian case, because if it were a violent revolution various minorities would feel gravely threatened.
Alas, that non-violent strategy has foundered on the rock of Syria’s sectarian and ethnic divisions. Sunni deserters from the army started fighting back, and all the other communities took fright. Now it’s a civil war in which the regime has the heavy weapons but the Sunni Arabs have the numbers.
Syria is just as complex a society as Lebanon, although we can still hope that the war does not go on as long. And it’s entirely possible that the Assad regime, whose senior ranks are mostly drawn from the Alawite minority (only 10 percent of the population), has deliberately chosen civil war. Better that than surrender power and expose the Alawites to the vengeance they fear from all those whom they have ruled for the past forty years.
This does not mean that the “Arab spring” was a mistake, or even that it is over. Few other Arab countries have as divided a population or as ruthless a regime as Syria. But it is still a great tragedy.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 13. (“In desperation…regime”; and “Syria…years”)
7 December 2011
Putin: The Erosion of Time
By Gwynne Dyer
“Throughout the day, it was like receiving reports from a war zone,” said Communist Party Vice Chairman Ivan Melnikov Dec. 4, speaking about the thousands of calls he had received from regional offices about ballot-box stuffing and other violations in the Russian parliamentary elections. But despite the manipulation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party got fewer than half the votes this time, down from almost two-thirds in 2007.
Putin’s party will still form the next government, since it can easily form a coalition with smaller pro-regime parties in the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, but it has lost the two-thirds majority that let it amend the constitution at will. And Putin will still return to the presidency in March’s presidential elections, but the erosion in his popular support is suddenly visible for all to see.
The first clear sign that Russians were getting fed up with Putin came two weeks ago, when he made an unheralded appearance at a martial-arts fight at the Olympiyskiy Stadium in Moscow. That wasn’t surprising, as he makes a great public show of his own prowess in the martial arts. But when he climbed into the ring to congratulate the winner, the audience began to boo and whistle at him. They didn’t stop until he left.
It was all broadcast live on Russian state television, and subsequently went viral on YouTube and the Russian social media. There is no credible rival to Putin on the scene, but neither is it certain any more that he will serve out the full six years of his new presidential term. He is wearing out his welcome.
During Putin’s two terms as president between 2000 and 2008, he stabilized the ravaged economy: average salaries increased fivefold and the GDP grew by almost 8 percent a year. High oil prices helped, but it was an impressive performance nonetheless, and when he left the presidency three years ago he could still do no wrong in the eyes of most Russians.
He left it because Russia’s constitution forbids a third consecutive term as president. It was a nice gesture, but he didn’t really leave power. His close ally, Dmitry Medvedev, was elected to the presidency, and then Medvedev appointed Putin as prime minister. In practice, Putin went on taking the big decisions himself – including the decision to return as president next year.
But the past four years have not been as kind to Putin as the first eight. The economy has stagnated, and the scale of the corruption has grown too large to ignore. (He is not personally corrupt, but everyone thinks he tolerates the massive corruption among his allies in order to maintain their loyalty.) So when he announced in September that he would run for the presidency again in March, something seems to have snapped.
In the past couple of months, Russians have suddenly woken up to the reality that they may face another 12 years of him as the all-powerful president (he’s only 59 now), and a lot of them have realized that they don’t actually like that prospect. Hence the steep fall in United Russia’s share of the vote Dec. 4 – and, probably, in Putin’s share of the presidential vote next March.
He’ll still win, of course, but it may be a long and miserable six years for him unless the oil price goes through the roof and Russia experiences another economic boom. Once the bloom goes off the rose, it almost never comes back. So where does Russia go from here?
Russia doesn’t need another revolution. Despite the chronic abuses of power, the perversion of the courts, and the intimidation of the media, Russia could re-emerge as a real democracy quite smoothly if Putin ever decided to let it.
Could he lead Russia through such a transition? It is not to be excluded, for Putin is acutely conscious of his place in history and would not want to end up being rejected at the polls or, even worse, being forced to yield power by a popular revolt. Better to hand the country over in good condition and retire gracefully in four or five years’ time. He is egotistical and arrogant, like most powerful people, but he is not just a thug.
12 October 2011
The Martyrdom of Yulia Tymoshenko
By Gwynne Dyer
There are three obvious explanations for Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s behaviour in the case of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who has just been sentenced to seven years in prison and a $186 million fine for a decision she made while in office that would never end up in court in a normal democratic country. None of the three reflect well on Yanukovych.
The first explanation is that he is simply waging a vendetta through the courts against Tymoshenko’s party. Seventeen other members of the government she led have also faced criminal charges over their conduct while in office, and several are already serving jail terms. So maybe Yanukovych is just a political thug who wants to destroy the opposition.
That would make sense, for Tymoshenko is a real threat to him: in last year’s presidential election, she lost by only 3 percent of the votes. However, she herself favours a different explanation. “This is an authoritarian regime,” Tymoshenko said when her sentence was read out on Tuesday. “Against the background of European rhetoric, Yanukovych is taking Ukraine farther from Europe by launching such political trials.”
“Taking Ukraine farther from Europe” is political code for taking it closer to Russia. There is a tug-of-war between Russia and the European Union over the future orientation of Ukraine, and in this analysis Yanukovych, who draws his support from the heavily Russified eastern Ukraine, is secretly Moscow’s man.
Tymoshenko, whose votes come mainly from western Ukraine, is the European Union’s favoured candidate for leader of Ukraine. So in this second explanation, favoured by Timoshenko, she is being railroaded into jail to serve the interests of the Kremlin. But there is a problem with this explanation.
The European Union’s condemnation of her trial was predictable. Carl Bildt, Swedish foreign minister, said: “Clearly this particular trial is conducted under laws that…should have no place in any country aspiring to European membership .” Heavy hints have been dropped that a jail sentence for Tymoshenko would jeopardise the free trade agreement between the EU and Ukraine that is due to be signed in December.
But the Russians have also condemned the trial. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who signed the deal with Tymoshenko, said that “It is dangerous and counterproductive to cast the entire package of agreements into doubt,” and the Russian Foreign Ministry declared that Tymoshenko’s conviction had a “clear anti-Russian subtext.”
The main charge against Tymoshenko is that she was too generous to Russia in a gas deal she signed in 2009 to end a dispute over the price Ukraine paid for gas and the transit fees it collected for Russian gas flowing across Ukraine in pipelines to customers further west. Tymoshenko has actually been convicted of being TOO NICE to Russia. How can you reconcile that with a Kremlin plot to draw Ukraine into its web?
This is clearly a political prosecution, not a criminal one. Nobody is saying that Tymoshenko was bribed by the Russians, or that she received any direct advantage from the deal she signed with Moscow. Perhaps she was too generous, but much of eastern Europe was freezing at the time and the situation was urgent. At worst, she might be accused of a political misjudgment.
Nobody believes the official claim that the Ukrainian courts are acting independently in this matter, and Yanukovych appears to have angered both the Russians and the West equally by his actions. Could there be a third explanation here? Could it all be just an very clumsy attempt by Yanukovych to prove that he is independent of both sides?
One should never underestimate the role of stupidity in politics, but this explanation is highly unlikely. Yanukovych is a ruthless and devious man, but he is not stupid. Let’s go back to Explanation Two, and try a subtler version of it.
Let us assume that Yanukovych is indeed Moscow’s man, and that his ultimate goal is to integrate Ukraine into the free-trade bloc that Russia is building with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Then he must somehow get the rival proposal for a free-trade agreement with the European Union off the table – but he doesn’t want to cancel it himself, for at least half of Ukrainian voters want closer integration with the West.
So the ideal solution would be to trick the EU into breaking off the free-trade talks with Ukraine by presenting it with some human-rights issue that forces its hand. If the EU suspends the talks over the legal persecution of Yulia Tymoshenko, it’s win-win for Yanukovych.
If this is really the strategy, then Moscow would have to play its part by protesting about Tymoshenko’s trial too – as it is indeed doing. Once the Ukraine-EU talks on a free-trade area have been broken off, Kiev and Moscow can kiss and make up. And after a decent interval, Yanukovych could bring Ukraine into the rival customs union with Moscow without too much domestic opposition.
This is what Tymoshenko herself fears. She does not want the EU to break off the free-trade talks because of her trial and conviction. “Ukraine must be saved,” she said last June. “If the EU pushes Ukraine away now and leaves it alone with this regime, our country will be thrown back for several decades.”
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To shorten to 700 words, omit paragraphs 6, 7 and 9. (“The European…subtext”; and “This is…misjudgment”)