Will Pension Protests ‘Take Down’ Putin?
(Russia Matters – russiamatters.org – August 2, 2018 – Simon Saradzhyan – russiamatters.org/blog/will-pension-protests-take-down-putin)
Simon Saradzhyan is the founding director of the Russia Matters Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
The protests do pose a risk for the Kremlin, but I very much doubt they will topple Russia’s president. Here are the reasons why.
First, while Russians’ confidence in Putin has dropped to 38 percent, his overall approval rating remains above 60 percent. According to Levada, 67 percent of Russians approved of Putin’s work as president in July 2018, which is 12 percentage points lower than in May, but much higher than his fellow strongman Erdogan’s pre-election approval rating of 49.8 percent, or the ratings of his democratic peers, such as Angela Merkel’s 48 percent, Donald Trump’s 45 percent and Emmanuel Macron’s 36.3 percent.
Second, as with other unpopular reforms, Putin has been trying to make sure he is not personally seen as fathering this idea and that it can be rolled back if protests rise to a critical level. Putin had Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s government draft and submit the bill on the pension age to the State Duma on June 19. The Duma then passed it in a first reading on July 19 only to see protests erupt across Russia and the popularity of the majority United Russia party sink to 37.1 percent, again the lowest since 2011. Seeing the backlash, Putin broke his silence on the issue on July 20, assuring the Russian public that the decision to raise the pension age is not final. My guess is, should the protests surge to a level that could threaten Putin’s grip on power, he can either soften the bill, perhaps by reducing the increase for women to 60 during the Duma’s second reading this fall, or have lawmakers put it on the back burner indefinitely.
So far the protests have not reached the scale of 2005, when tens of thousands of pensioners rallied across Russia, blocking highways, to protest reforms to the social-welfare system, or of fall 2011/winter 2012, when hundreds of thousands protested Putin’s pending return to the Kremlin and alleged fraud in parliamentary elections—a wave of discontent that some Russia watchers prematurely described as a “Snow Revolution.” In both those cases Putin eventually offered concessions, however small, raising pensions and suggesting more leeway for small opposition parties. We are likely to see the same tactic again: His is a semi-authoritarian regime, but not without some sensitivity to public opinion, and Putin has demonstrated in the past that he is adaptive to significant changes in that opinion.
However, while Russians’ current anger over the pension reform is unlikely to topple Putin, he still faces longer-term challenges that both he and his successors will have to grapple with. On Russia’s current trajectory its share of the global population will decline by 31 percent by 2050, while its share in global economic output will drop by 23 percent, according to the U.N. and PricewaterhouseCoopers, respectively. Though all long-term forecasts should be taken with a grain of salt, Russian leaders will need to figure out how to implement structural reforms to cope with these challenges without alienating the Russian public in dangerous ways.
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