Aftonbladet: Putin forced to act like a democratic elected leader


By diminishing the power of the president and giving Parliament more to say about, Putin is trying to prepare the ground for himself as someone who can continue to pull the strings more in the background. Exactly how it will go is too early to say yet.

Clearly, Putin does not want to repeat the old trick of a direct job exchange with his Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. It was an obvious way to bypass the constitution and give him a new opportunity to come back as president later. When that happened in 2012, the citizens were cursed. It was the first time the Russian people had shown their dissatisfaction with Putin by going out on the streets and demonstrating.

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