Putin confirms he will run for a fifth term as an independent

It's official! Vladimir Putin will be seeking a fifth six-year term as President of Russia in the 2024 Presidential Election.

“I've had different thoughts at different times, but this is a time when a decision has to be made,” Putin said after an awards ceremony for army personnel at the Kremlin, according to French newspaper Le Monde.

However, there's a catch: Putin won't be running with his political party, United Russia. Instead, he's running as an independent.

AP News explains that, instead, hundreds of politicians, celebrities, artists, and athletes and signed to support Putin's presidential candidacy. Under Russian law, he would need 300,000 to run without a party's support.

Reuters remarks that, although Putin won't be running as the candidate of United Russia, he still has full support of the party.

Party support or not, very few people question who will win the next Russian presidential elections, scheduled for March 2024.

A poll conducted by the Leveda Center, an independent Russian research center, revealed that almost 70% of the country’s population would approve 6 more years of Putin in power.

Yahoo News singled out some reasoning behind those who support Putin. 29% of them believe that Putin “leads the right policy” and that he helps to “strengthen the state”.

Meanwhile, 20% of those polled that were in favor of Putin simply claimed that they believe that he is “a good president”.

Finally, 17% claimed that they preferred Putin because he was “for the people”, “maintains stability” and that there was “no alternative”.

Overall, the Levada Center describes the general attitude towards Putin as “neutral-positive”.

23% describe having “sympathy” towards him, 19% feel “admiration” and 31% simply state that “they have nothing bad to say about him”.

The Leveda Center report described the average Putin voter as someone over 50, middle-to-upper class, whose main source of information was television.

In contrast, people who opposed Putin the most tended to be poorer, between 18 and 24, and informed themselves through the Internet.

Back in 2022, Business Insider reported that it was not clear if Putin would be running in 2024. Experts claimed that this was part of the Russian leader’s games to keep the opposition guessing.

Vladimir Putin first became Prime Minister and then acting President in the year 2000, after Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation during his New Year’s Eve speech.

Then, in March 2000, Putin was elected President for a four-year term with 53% of the votes.

Putin then won a landslide victory in 2004 with 71.91% of the vote. The runner-up, Nilokay Kharitonov of the Communist Party of Russia, only obtained 13%.

In 2018, Putin could not run for a third consecutive term due to provisions in the Russian Constitution at the time. Instead, he supported Dmitry Medvedev, who became President of Russia for four years.

This didn’t mean Putin was quite out of the government. One day after handing the Presidential Office, he was appointed as Prime Minister for his party, United Russia.

Medvedev didn’t run for a second term, and Putin became a presidential candidate once more and he won in 2012. Medvedev went on to be Prime Minister of Russia until 2020.

A series of constitutional amendments introduced in 2008 changed presidential terms in Russia from 4 to 6 years, which meant Putin wouldn’t face new elections until 2018.

Unsurprisingly, Putin won his fourth presidential term in 2018 despite accusations of voting manipulation from the West.

The Russian Constitution was amended further in 2020, allowing Putin to run for two more terms or, in other words, until 2036.

Putin would be 84 by 2036 and, if he stays in power till then, he will have served a longer length in the Kremlin than Stalin himself.

However, with rumors of health problems and the invasion of Ukraine apparently getting out of his hands, many people wonder if Putin’s time is running out sooner rather than later.