Putin Former Ally Says It’s Time for Prime Minister’s 12-Year Rule to End
Sergei Mironov
Kirll Kudryavstev/AFP/Getty Images
Sergei Mironov, the ousted speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament who’s challenging his long-time ally Vladimir Putin for the Kremlin, said it’s time for the prime minister to relinquish his 12-year rule.
Sergei Mironov, the ousted speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament who’s challenging his long-time ally Vladimir Putin for the Kremlin, said it’s time for the prime minister to relinquish his 12-year rule. Photographer: Kirll Kudryavstev/AFP/Getty Images
Sergei Mironov, the ousted speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament who’s challenging his long-time ally Vladimir Putin for the Kremlin, said it’s time for the prime minister to relinquish his 12-year rule.
“Putin must go,” said Mironov, who leads the Just Russia opposition party and plans to join a protesters’ march for the first time in downtown Moscow on Feb. 4. “I don’t see any willingness by Putin to change the political system. He believes monopoly of power is good.”
Speaking in an interview in his office in the State Duma, where he leads the party’s parliamentary faction, the former paratrooper pledged to put up a “very serious fight” in the March 4 presidential election.
Putin, 59, is facing the biggest challenge to his rule since he replaced the ailing President Boris Yeltsin on Dec. 31, 1999. Major challengers in the presidential race are backing demands for new parliamentary elections after allegations of fraud in Dec. 4 legislative polls sparked mass protests in Russian cities.
Russian stocks gained for the first time in four days yesterday, with the Micex Index adding 0.1 percent to 1,464.42 in Moscow. Stocks fell during the previous session after Fitch Ratings cut its outlook on Russia’s BBB credit grade to stable from positive, citing an increase in “political uncertainty.”
St. Petersburg Ally
Mironov, 58, is an associate of Putin from their home town of St. Petersburg and ran for president in 2004 while supporting Putin’s candidacy in the same race. Four years ago, he urged then-President Putin to sidestep a constitutional ban on three consecutive terms and seek to extend his tenure in the Kremlin. Putin ended up handing the presidency to his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, for four years.
Mironov is now publicly critical of Putin, who he says will drive the country into decline if he stays in office by perpetuating a tightly-controlled political system and reliance on oil and gas exports.
“In 10 years this will be a dumb country that works on assembled products and producing oil,” Mironov said. “All thinking people will work in Silicon Valley, India, China or elsewhere and we’ll end up with a country that’s been completely emptied.”
After Mironov was removed as speaker of the Federation Council last year, his Just Russia party almost doubled its share of the vote in the Duma elections to 13.3 percent from 7.7 percent in 2007.
Putin’s Popularity Ebbs
Putin, whose popularity has been declining for several years, has close to the 50 percent backing needed to win the presidential vote in the first round, according to the latest poll published by the state-run All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion.
The prime minister would get 48 percent, compared with 10 percent for Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, 9 percent for Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the nationalist Liberal Democrats and 5 percent for Mironov, according to the Jan. 7-8 survey of 1,600 Russians. The margin of error was 3.4 percentage points.
Opposition politicians including Zyuganov and political analysts such as Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin adviser, say Putin doesn’t have enough support to win an outright victory and that ballot-rigging to ensure success will stoke wider unrest.
Putin’s United Russia party inflated its share of last month’s Duma vote to about 50 percent from 30 percent and even “major fraud” can’t bring about a first-round victory, Zyuganov said Jan. 11.
Not ‘Most Dangerous’
Mironov said he poses the greatest threat to Putin and is confident of overtaking Zyuganov for a place in the second round. Unlike the Communist leader, he’d be able to rally support from “90 percent” of other candidates’ supporters, he added.
If there’s no initial winner, a second round will be held within 21 days. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday he doesn’t see Mironov as the “most dangerous” challenger, adding that Putin has every chance to win without a runoff.
The Just Russia leader, whose party campaigns for social justice, has pledged to halt further privatization of major state-controlled companies and replace the 13 percent flat rate of income tax with a progressive scale. He also wants to introduce a 20 percent levy on all capital outflows as a “cold shower for offshore lovers.” Russia’s net outflow of capital more than doubled last year to $84.2 billion.
New Parliamentary Vote
On Jan. 16, Mironov reached out to the middle-class urban Russians who have formed the backbone of the election protests by promising to step down as president by the end of 2013 and allow new elections under more democratic rules. He also promised to hold a new parliamentary vote in December and introduce a maximum of two presidential terms.
In December, Medvedev proposed legislation to make it easier to register parties and run for president, changes that wouldn’t take full effect until 2016 and 2018, when the next parliamentary and presidential elections are scheduled.
“Russia’s growth over the next decades means expanding freedoms for each of us,” Putin said in a Jan. 16 article in the Izvestia newspaper and posted on his website.
While Mironov and another challenger, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, are in the presidential race with Putin’s blessing, their campaigns are loosening the premier’s grip, said Boris Makarenko of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow.
Prokhorov has also pledged another parliamentary vote in December and to serve only four years as president. Both he and Mironov have called for the release of jailed Yukos Oil Co. owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who accuses Putin of political persecution. Prokhorov said yesterday he’d name Khodorkovsky prime minister if he’s elected.
“It’s about an imitation of pluralism in the presidential election but if Putin tries to stifle competition this will be damaging for him above all,” said Makarenko. “Society is ready for more pluralism and the political system is lagging behind.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Ilya Arkhipov in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.net;
To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net
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