Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Expert speculation

Joshua Tucker, who teaches at New York University, recently reported in The Monkey Cage blog about speculation concerning the next Russian presidential election.

How to Get a Second Term in 2012: Russian Edition
I'm just back from the newly renamed Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies annual conference. While there, I had the pleasure of chairing a roundtable on current Russian politics that featured presentations from Timothy Colton, Henry Hale, Steven Fish, and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss.

At the conclusion of the panel, the topic turned to the coming Russian presidential elections. What makes the 2012 presidential elections in Russia interesting is that there actually is quite a lot of uncertainty about who will be elected president that year, for a now rather imposing six year term. Bucking the general anti-incumbency trend in Eastern Europe, we know that the next president of Russia will either be the current Russian President Dmitry Medvedev or the previous Russian President and current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. We just don't know which one it will be. We do, however, know, that the election itself will not be used to settle this question. Only one of these two men will be on the ballot, and he will win the election...

Do you know What You Need to Know?

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1 Comments:

At 9:04 AM, Blogger Ken Wedding said...

Medvedev warns of political 'stagnation' in Russia

"Russia risks slipping into a period of political 'stagnation', President Dmitry Medvedev has warned.

"In his videoblog, Mr Medvedev spoke about the lack of real competition in the political arena, heavily dominated by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party...

"When they hear the word 'stagnation' many Russians immediately think of the 1970s and the days of Leonid Brezhnev - when the Soviet Union lost direction and 'stagnation' laid the foundation for the USSR's future demise...

"Some analysts say the president is trying to position himself as a modernising force in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2012, where he can potentially stand against former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

"Neither Mr Medvedev nor Mr Putin has publicly declared their intention to run for Russia's top job."

 

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