Putin says he hasn’t decided on a 2024 presidential run, a power move that a Russia expert says is how he keeps opposition ‘off balance’
- Putin still hasn’t decided if he’ll run for president in 2024, his spokesperson said.
- Western officials have suggested the Ukraine war has weakened his position, per The Times of London.
President Vladimir Putin has not yet decided if he’ll run in Russia’s 2024 presidential election, his top spokesperson said on Wednesday. It’s a standard move for him, an expert in Russian politics said, that keeps his opposition guessing.
Dmitry Peskov gave the one-word answer “No” to a reporter’s query on Putin’s decision, state-controlled outlet TASS reported on Wednesday.
Thanks to a law he enacted in 2021, Putin is eligible for another two six-year terms as president — meaning that he could potentially be president until 2036. He has already led the country, as president or as prime minister, for 21 years.
Putin’s law tightened his grip on power even more. Washington think tank Freedom House gives Russia one of its lowest rankings for electoral freedoms, citing a long-term erosion of any semblance of free and fair elections.
Unnamed western officials suggested that missteps in the war in Ukraine has prompted speculation in Russia about a challenge to Putin in 2024, The Times of London reported.
“People are talking more about succession and imagining a life beyond Putin,” the paper cited an official as saying. “Russia is not a democratic country and there is no prospect of change in the near future. But the middle of this decade is starting to look interesting.”
Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine based on “incredibly faulty information,” an official told the paper. That error has weakened him, the officials said.
Commenting on the possibility that failures in Ukraine could have weakened his chances in general, Dr Sarah Whitmore, a specialist in Russian and Ukrainian politics at the UK’s Oxford Brookes University, told Insider: “I’m not sure whether the mood will sour.”
“It’s a really mixed picture,” she said. She noted that most Russians — particularly older ones — get most of their information from highly controlled state TV. There, a major narrative is that Russia’s security is under threat.
“Putin is the person to protect them, and is the only one, because who else is there?” she said. “There is no-one else because anyone else has been systematically excluded from the political scene long ago.”
Staying quiet about his next move is standard practice from Putin, she said.
“Putin always has to keep people guessing,” she said, outlining how Putin waited until the last minute to announce his candidacy in the 2012 election. “It’s really important because it helped keep the groups around Putin off balance.”
She said it’s likely Putin doesn’t know whether he’ll run. “He may be thinking about whether he can make an exit if his health, for example, were to deteriorate,” she said.
“But it would make no sense to say that now, because that would immediately start some kind of internal power struggle as people jostled over who would be next.”
Asked the same question in July this year, Peskov gave even less information, telling reporters: “Ask him yourself,” as TASS reported.
