Putin power

Sunday will be Russia’s Coronation Day. The emperor is back from his constitutionally imposed four-year break, Dmitri Medvedev, the fill-in, finds his coach turning back into a prime ministerial pumpkin, and Vladimir Putin will be president for another term: only this time it’s been extended to six years. President of Russia till 2018, and he’ll still only be 65. But for the first time it’s possible to ask ourselves whether the long-running Putin project will carry on working as smoothly as it has so far.

There’s no doubt about Sunday: Putin will walk it in the first round. Some of the other candidates are serious enough — the perennial communist Gennadi Zyuganov, for instance, or Russia’s third richest man, Mikhail Prokhorov, who made his pile out of nickel and gold and bought an American basketball team.

There are also the usual nut-jobs. At an election some years ago, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, of the reassuring-sounding but über-nationalist Liberal Democrats, promised to issue free vodka to everyone if he won; Sergei Mironov campaigned in the 2004 election on the self-effacing slogan ‘We all want Vladimir Putin to be the next president’. The voters took him at his word, and he got less than 1 per cent. Still, Putin later repaid him by awarding him the Order of Merit for the Fatherland. Third class.

Some months ago Vladimir Putin warned it would be a dirty campaign. It hasn’t been, though the scoop achieved by state-controlled Channel One about a plot by Chechen extremists to assassinate Putin after the election raised eyebrows. Opposition groups wearily reacted by calling it an election stunt. Putin’s press secretary, a charming but intemperate character called Dmitri Peskov, who did a lot of shouting on Newsnight earlier this week, called the suggestion ‘blasphemous’, which placed his boss on a new level of power altogether.