Is Putin's power slipping away?

Vladimir Putin has used his third term as president to cast Russia as the great “geopolitical disruptor,” a hacking superpower, writes Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg View. But with no coherent domestic policy, Putin might find that even if he is reelected in March that his power is much diminished.

“The Soviet-style campaign announcement on Wednesday -- during a visit to a truck factory in Nizhny Novgorod, where a worker asked him a ‘spontaneous’ question about the election -- is evidence of the Kremlin’s lack of ideas, characteristic of its domestic policy during Putin’s third term. Putin’s legitimacy after his inevitable win will be the lowest of his reign, spurring an ever more active battle for succession, in which new players are likely to start emerging as soon as Putin is re-enthroned,” Bershidsky argues.

“Putin has presided over, indeed enabled, a corrupt, inefficiently run country where people -- including those in the top echelons of business and power -- just fend for themselves as best they can. The question of what kind of future Russia might have will arise after Putin's re-election, and Putin won't necessarily have much say in it.”

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