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Look at #Putin's trust rating, not his approval rating, I argue in the latest dispatch. It has to do with much more than how he has handled the #COVID19 pandemic. http://www.noyardstick.com/?p=727
The pandemic has led to a so-called “rally-around-the-flag” effect in several countries around the world, e.g. in Europe Merkel, Rutter, Conte, even Macron enjoyed sudden surges in their or their party's popularity. Putin's ratings, meanwhile, dropped to historic lows. Why?
It wd be easy to explain this w just the pandemic. Yes, Putin took a back seat. Yes, he delegated responsibility to lower-level officials and held back on providing significant financial aid to governors, businesses or citizens. But this wd be a lazy and insufficient explanation.
First off, save for the initial weeks of the crisis, Putin has been very much present in Russian media and announced whatever positive measure there was to announce, focused his statements on topics with a positive connotation (mostly work) and occasionally scolded subordinates.
If you squinted hard enough, some of these appearances even looked like slightly modified, skeletal versions of the yearly “Direct Line” shows, in which Putin solves various problems from stalled road repairs to failing marriages. He is present, but these recipes don't work.
In fact, both of Levada's indicators had been on a downwards trajectory for years. In March '17 towards the end of a period of abnormally strong support, Putin’s approval rating was 82%. In Nov '17 59% named him as one of the 5-6 politicians whom they trusted the most.
These numbers started falling in 2018 and have more or less been falling ever since. In March 2019, after the PR disaster of the 2018 pension reform, protests and electoral upsets in the regions, Putin’s approval rating was 64 percent and his trust rating was 41 percent.
But the difference between the two trajectories is striking. While Putin’s approval rating settled around or slightly below 60% his trust rating experienced a further precipitous drop, a whopping 13 pts, in a little more than a year. Therein lies the real concern for the Kremlin.
It is an oft repeated mantra that Putin is more of an institution than a political figure. What this really means beyond the myth of the national leader placing himself above the arduous job of actually running the state is rarely explained.
Putin as an institution is perhaps best explained through the crisis of political responsibility, which engulfed Russia in the past decade: a centralisation of revenues and power that left most regions with governors lacking political and fiscal autonomy or popular legitimacy;
With the opaque Presidential Administration (and in certain areas the Security Council) emerging as the most powerful decision-making body, the government has had an increasingly weak influence over the policies that it supposedly implements.
Representative institutions have been hollowed out with their powers outsourced to ‘adhocrats’ (h/t @MarkGaleotti) trusted technocrats and configurations of security elites. Increasingly for citizens Putin has remained the only visible and tangible political authority.
This in turn has meant that the president’s intervention is sought more and more often to solve local problems, from rigging an election in the Primorsky Krai, to stopping the construction of a church in Yekaterinburg.
This doesn't mean that Putin has exercised “manual control”; but Russians have been asked to believe that if a problem cannot be solved at the local level, Putin is able to solve it; that while he may not participate in day-to-day matters, his orders are eventually carried out.
This is what recent months have called into question. The implementation of Putin’s “May Decrees” in 2012 was patchy but there was no sense of urgency. The National Projects, another signature policy that has most likely been shelved, cd not fully materialize in public conscience
With the coronavirus pandemic, however, Russia faces a crisis of unknown proportions, in which no one really knows what to do. Many are looking to Putin for guidance, but it doesn't come, and what's worse, when he does give orders, these are not always carried out.
When Russian doctors launch an online petition to call on the government to pay out bonuses that Putin promised a month ago, they are not questioning Putin’s decisions, but his ability to implement them. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/05/07/russian-medics-demand-putins-promised-coronavirus-bonuses-a70212
This, in a nutshell, is the difference between “approval” and “trust”. This is why it matters which rating falls and which one is simply low.
In an enjoyable and well-argued piece on popular memes featuring Putin Svetlana Shomova pointed out something very important: despite his best efforts, Putin was unable to disassociate his ratings and image from the reality on the ground. https://www.ridl.io/en/putin-the-man-putin-the-meme/
In my view this, rather than any kind of constitutional reform or diplomatic grandstanding would have been the ultimate step in his graduation from politician to institution.
In December 2016 when Putin seemed to be at the apex of his glory, I asked in a blog whether he would succeed in pulling the ultimate trick of building a virtual reality to hide empty fridges and missing paychecks and concluded that he was well placed to try.
Three and a half years later it still does not look like Putin is going anywhere any time soon. Among other things, in Levada’s survey no one is trusted even remotely as much as he is, not to mention that there is rarely appetite for momentous political changes during crises.
Even his constitutional reform enjoys stronger support than a month ago (though the reasons are unclear). But it looks like the big experiment of placing Putin above the system that he created has failed. And this will have consequences once the crisis is over.
/end
PS: Here are @levada_ru's numbers.
https://www.levada.ru/2020/05/06/odobrenie-institutov-vlasti-i-doverie-politikam/
PS: Here are @levada_ru's numbers.
https://www.levada.ru/2020/05/06/odobrenie-institutov-vlasti-i-doverie-politikam/
