Vladimir Putin will be elected president, but the system he devised to run the country no longer works
Vladimir Putin will win on Sunday. Of that there can be little doubt, but there the certainty stops. Putin set off a chain reaction of protest by announcing last September that he would run for a third term as president. The more he tried to make his will a reality, the more it became clear how rusty his levers had become. His talent for "manual guidance" jammed in the face of the biggest political crisis of his career. Democracy stopped being so effectively "managed".
It was not just that something had flipped in the collective psyche, especially among the class of Russians who had done so well out of Putin's early years. It was also that the state machine of personally appointed friends and bureaucrats had stopped functioning.
So Putin faces a problem on re-election. As former Kremlin insider Gleb Pavlovsky says, Putin will have his win but there will be no effective system for him to use. He will not be able to solve problems single-handedly, so will be obliged to rule by coalition – which he hates.
This crisis began two years ago. It did not start on the internet, but much closer to home – in the Kremlin itself. Putin was getting nervous at President Dmitry Medvedev's rising poll ratings. The more assertive his protege became, the less the two men talked about who would be the next president of Russia. Worse, those lower down the food chain were watching them, deciding which leader to support. Even the so-called siloviki – the generals in the FSB spy agency and the army, whom Putin once held in his pocket – were hedging their bets, as their personal wealth depended on backing the winner.
Putin, who is normally cautious, felt he had to act. His decision to return turned out to be a tactical error, but it was not an unforced one.
The dysfunction of Russian governance runs through every one of its strata. Kirill Liats is the director general of Metaprocess, which designs chemical and power plants. Business should be booming in this sector as the contracts are handed out by the state's largest monopoly, Gazprom. But Liats says: "Despite all Putin's assurances that Russia remains a calm harbour in the world's financial crisis, in reality the Russian economy is in a really serious financial crisis. No one has any money. Even Gazprom has problems paying its subcontractors. All of them, whether they are linked to Putin's circle or not, wait around for their bills to be paid, and some are hardly paid at all."
Businessmen like him are unperturbed by the appearance of Putin's friends at the top of the oil and gas supply industry, as long as a normal market is allowed to operate beneath them. But it does not. There are takeovers that no one can stop. A host of regulatory state agencies prey on medium-sized companies for bribes. It's known as feeding at the trough. If an oil- and gas-rich Russia is unable to create a healthy downstream market in this sector, what chance does it have of reviving the rest of its industry, and weaning itself off its fossil fuel revenues? Putin does not have an industrial policy worthy of the name. It's almost impossible for businessmen to get loans from domestic banks – the capital flies off around the world instead.
Manufacturing a decisive vote in Sunday's election will not address these issues. And yet, left unaddressed, the coalition of those who blame Putin for Russia's woes will surely only grow. No longer the guarantor of Russia's stability as it became in 2000, the system he created around him will gradually become the driver of its instability. At its crudest, it consists of around 2,000 people who have vast wealth and power, and can act with impunity. This elite serves only itself. This is not a happy formula for democracy in Russia, whoever Putin eventually finds to manage it.
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