Putin moves a step closer to a fifth term as president after Russia sets 2024 election date
Putin, 71, hasn’t yet announced his intention to run again, but is widely expected to do so in the coming days now that the date has been set.
MOSCOW: Russian lawmakers on Thursday set the date of the country’s 2024 presidential election for March 17, moving Vladimir Putin a step closer to a fifth term in office.
Members of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, voted unanimously to approve a decree setting the date.
“In essence, this decision marks the start of the election campaign,” said Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council. Russia’s central election commission is to hold a meeting on the presidential campaign on Friday.
Putin, 71, hasn’t yet announced his intention to run again, but is widely expected to do so in the coming days now that the date has been set.
Under constitutional reforms he orchestrated, he is eligible to seek two more six-year terms after his current one expires next year, potentially allowing him to remain in power until 2036.
Having established tight control over Russia’s political system, Putin’s victory in the March election is all but assured. Prominent critics who could challenge him on the ballot are either in jail or living abroad, and most independent media have been banned.
Neither the costly, drawn-out war in Ukraine, nor a failed rebellion last summer by mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin appear to have affected his high approval ratings reported by independent pollsters.
Who will challenge him on the ballot remains unclear. Imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an online statement Thursday urged his supporters to vote for anyone but Putin.
“Putin views this election as a referendum on approval of his actions. A referendum on approval of the war. Let’s disrupt his plans and make it happen so that no one on March 17 is interested in the rigged result, but that all of Russia saw and understood: the will of the majority is that Putin must leave,” the statement said.
Two people have announced plans to run: former lawmaker Boris Nadezhdin, who holds a seat on a municipal council in the Moscow region, and Yekaterina Duntsova, a journalist and lawyer from the Tver region north of Moscow, who once was a member of a local legislature.
Allies of Igor Strelkov, a jailed hard-line nationalist who accused Putin of weakness and indecision in Ukraine, have cited his ambitions to run as well, but extremism charges levied against him by the Russian authorities render his candidacy unlikely.
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