Putin pushing for two more terms

In his first lengthy interview since last month’s announcement that he will seek a third presidential term, the 59-year-old yesterday said that Communist-era leaders were not physically capable and did not have “the will” to run the country the way he did.

After serving two presidential terms, Mr Putin anointed a successor, Dmitry Medvedev, who appointed him prime minister and was widely seen as a No 2 leader. Mr Putin can run for two more consecutive terms and could stay in power until 2024.

He said his decision still leaves average Russians an opportunity to “make their choice” in the upcoming elections in March.

Mr Putin also sought to defend his controversial plan to seek a third mandate as president, saying Russia needed stability and was only a few steps from a return to the collapse of the 1990s.

Speaking in televised remarks that showed a rare acknowledgement of public discontent, Mr Putin said his political opponents claim “everything is so bad, that it could not get worse”.

“Saying that things cannot get worse, I would be careful,” he said. “It’s enough to take two or three wrong steps and everything that was before could overwhelm us so quickly that we would not even have time to look around.”

In a startling admission of the fragility of the stability that he prides himself on bringing to Russia since coming to power in 1999, he said: “Everything here is tacked together, both in politics and in the economy.”

He also referred to the troubled North Caucasus, saying that “we still have many problems there”, while admitting that Russia as a whole has problems with crime and terrorism.

“I never sought out this post,” Mr Putin said, referring to the Kremlin role. “But if I set out to tackle something, I try to bring the matter to its logical conclusion, or, at the very least, to bring this matter to the maximum effect.”

In a punchy, populist interview broadcast simultaneously on the three main national channels, he reminded Russians of the shortages of the late 1980s as the Soviet economy collapsed, by telling a joke from the time.

“Friends come round to visit and the hosts ask: ‘Do you want to wash your hands with soap? Yes? Then you’ll have to drink your tea without sugar.’”

In Mr Putin’s opinion, the wrong steps taken by the Russian leadership at the time led to the downfall and collapse of the country and created the circumstances that were behind the country’s dissolution.

He said: “It was in this way that we threw out the baby with the bath water – the dirty water of an inadequate political system and an inefficient economy. We allowed the country to collapse. This was also a time when people said that things could not get any worse.”

He stressed he had not “clung onto” his presidential position, but listed national leaders who had stood for three presidential terms, saying times of turbulence called for political stability.

With an eye to his position in history, he referred to one of his political heroes, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, stressing he stood for office four times, and quoted another, the French leader Charles De Gaulle: “Choose the most difficult way and then you can be sure of at least one thing: you won’t have any competitors.”

Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev have backed one another to switch roles after 2012 presidential elections. Mr Medvedev proposed Mr Putin for president at the United Russia congress in late September, saying he was ready to serve as prime minister in case of Mr Putin’s victory.