Vladimir Putin's annual question and answer session. Kremlin.ru
Leonid Bershidsky, Moscow Times: Putin’s Domestic Comeback Isn’t Working
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a man of routine, and one might have been tempted to ignore his 17th annual call-in show with voters as another pointless set piece. This year, however, the context made it more important than most of the previous ones: Putin, who’s trying to return to pedestrian domestic concerns after a long foray into great-power politics, is facing a drop in popularity and Russians’ growing fatigue.
He made a valiant attempt to show he cares, but he ultimately failed. The spirit of what happened during the more than four-hour broadcast was best described by feminist blogger Alena Popova: “The citizens of a poor country call the president of some other, rich country.”
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WNU Editor: I have been tired of him for years, but what is different now is that many members of my family in Russia are also getting tired of him (which is a first). Will this change anything. No. President Putin is there for the next few years, whether we like it or not.
He will always have a mandate to govern as long as tensions with the west are so strained. The only alternatives right now are the hawks who tell Putin that he needs to stop referring to the west as "his partners" and start getting the country into a war footing, or the fringe left like Navalny who only enjoy single digit support (if that). I don't know if they're lucky to have him, as he's stayed so patient with the west as we've gone through this ridiculous soap opera featuring them as the moustache-twirling villains, or if they would've been better served by a more bellicose strongman who engaged in the same kind of hard-headed brinksmanship as Trump. Because that's all they'd get if Putin never ran in the last election. The Navalny hype in the western media is as fake as the daily rape accusations against the president; he'll never be electable with the stink of American intelligence still dripping from his pores.
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