No “other choice”: Vladimir Putin announced that he was a candidate for a fifth term during the presidential elections on March 17 in Russia, his re-election leaving little doubt after almost a quarter of a century in power and the repression of opposition.
The Russian president, whom a 2020 constitutional reform authorizes to be a candidate again in 2024 and 2030, can theoretically remain in the Kremlin until 2036, the year he turns 84.
“At another time I had other thoughts regarding this question. But I understand that today there is no other choice. So I will run for the post of President of Russia,” declared the 71-year-old.
Mr. Putin was speaking in the Kremlin, according to images broadcast by state television, and was responding to a question asked during an exchange with several people, including fighters, who had just received official decorations.
The president felt that “the time to make a decision (had) come,” according to another excerpt of the exchange broadcast on television.
The announcement was reported a few minutes earlier by a participant in the exchange, Artiom Joga, a fighter and member of the local Russian Parliament in Donetsk, an occupied city in eastern Ukraine.
“Our president has never shied away and will never shirk his responsibilities. Today he proved it again,” Valentina Matvienko, the speaker of the upper house of Parliament, reacted on Telegram.
No critic of the Kremlin should be able to stand in the vote, while the authorities have been crushing the opposition for years. This repression accelerated with the offensive in Ukraine.
The vote will be held on March 17, shortly after the second anniversary of the launch of the ongoing “special military operation” in Ukraine and on the eve of the tenth anniversary of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine. a first Ukrainian territory, the Crimean peninsula.
After a year 2022 marked by setbacks on the front and a volley of Western sanctions, Vladimir Putin appears at the end of 2023 in a better position with the failure of the counter-offensive launched this summer by Ukraine, the crumbling of European support and American in kyiv and the recovery of the national economy.
Almost all major opponents, such as anti-corruption activist Alexeï Navalny, have been thrown in prison or driven into exile and any criticism of the assault on Ukraine is severely punished.
No competitors
The Russian Electoral Commission announced Friday that the vote will be held over three days, from March 15 to 17, a practice introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic, but denounced by the opposition as a means of facilitating fraud.
Mr. Putin was president from 2000 to 2008 and has been again since 2012. Affected by the term limit, he ceded the Kremlin from 2008 to 2012 to an ally, Dmitry Medvedev, but remained as prime minister the strong man of Russia.
Born in 1952 in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg), he first led a career as an agent for the KGB, the Soviet secret services, notably in East Germany, before returning to Russia after the dislocation of the USSR.
He began his political career at the town hall of Saint Petersburg, before quickly joining the Kremlin and climbing the ranks, cultivating the image of a firm and efficient man, in the midst of the tumult of the 1990s in Russia.
Appointed prime minister, then succeeding Boris Yeltsin after his resignation on December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin gradually brought the country into line, dismantling the democratic gains of the 1990s and advocating a power policy nostalgic for the USSR and increasingly more conservative.
He has launched or supported four wars since coming to power: the second Chechen war (1999-2009), the invasion of Georgia (2008), the intervention in Syria (2015) and the attacks on Ukraine in first in 2014 then in 2022.
Since a controversial constitutional reform adopted in the midst of a pandemic in 2020, he has the possibility of remaining in the Kremlin until 2036.
His spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, indicated in mid-November that Mr. Putin had no credible competitor.
The work of the media during this election will be complicated by a tightening of coverage conditions decided by the authorities in November, in particular on access to voting or counting.
The election will also take place in the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, where martial law is currently in force.