While the tiger-hunting, jet flying, oligarch-jailing judo blackbelt may already comfortably be the most powerful man in Russia, Vladimir Putin has never been one to take chances.
And it must frustrate the PM that, despite having unlimited resources and virtually no opposition, his approval ratings hover at around 50% while those of his behemoth United Russia party are closer to 40%.
What to do? Create an All-Russian United People’s Front.
But by contrast to the People’s Front of Judea, this Front will engender no such confusion, because it will be the only front in Russia. (Just another example of Putin making people’s lives simpler…)
Like a giant political black hole, Putin’s Front will comprise not just United Russia, but suck in everything else, from assorted minor parties to youth groups and civil society organisations. Any remaining debris would be either too irrelevant to pose a threat (Communist Party) or too small (liberal/left opposition a la Nemtsov-Limonov) to survive the 3% election threshold.
Most importantly, it is probably intended to also suck up the increasingly assertive Dmitry Medvedev.
Recently, increased tension within the tandem has caused Russia’s political elite to spend “the whole last month on the verge of a nervous breakdown” over trying to decide whose camp to give their loyalties ahead of the 2012 election.
The very idea of a Popular Front is itself an interesting and slightly anachronistic concept in the 21st century, more evocative of the Spanish Civil War or the tumult of interwar France than modern politics.
Of course, the most famous example of a Popular Front was the one created by none other than Joseph Stalin in the 30s, when the Moscow-based Comintern organised just such a front to swallow up and control the various European and American left movements.
Interestingly in the context of the wobbly tandem, Stalin’s front may have been designed as much to dominate foreign parties as to contain and defeat internal dissenters, notably Trotsky.
The policy was so effective that after WWII, many single-party Communist states continued to be formally governed by United or Popular Fronts; notably, East Germany and China.
A shape of things to come?
