Vladimir Putin was due to leave office in 2008. The constitution he inherited allowed no more than two consecutive four-year terms, and when he took power that was the deal. He is still there. How he got around the limit explains most of what has kept him in power since 1999.
When Boris Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999, Putin stepped in as acting president. Yeltsin had named him prime minister in August of that year. A former KGB foreign intelligence officer, Putin had left the service in 1991 and gone into politics. He won the 2000 election with 53.0% of the vote and the 2004 election with 71.3%.
Working around the term limit
In 2008 he backed Dmitry Medvedev for the presidency and took the prime minister’s job himself. People magazine described the arrangement as a way to keep “pulling strings” without the top title. Medvedev then oversaw the first major amendments to the constitution, including a change that lengthened the presidential term from four years to six, effective in 2012. Putin came back that year with 63.6% of the vote, then won 76.7% in 2018.
By then a further obstacle loomed: he would have reached his limit in 2024. A law that “reset” the count of his time in office removed it, and a controversial 2020 constitutional reform means he can legally stay until at least 2036. In December 2023 he announced a run for a fifth term, which News18 said was expected to hold him in power to 2030. He already ranked as Russia’s longest-serving ruler since Josef Stalin, ahead of Leonid Brezhnev’s 1964-82 tenure.
A thin field
The opposition has had little room. News18 wrote that Putin had brought oligarchs to heel and banned any real opposition. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition politician, was in jail in late 2023 and could not run. In 2018, the runner-up, the strawberry tycoon Pavel Grudinin, a former Putin supporter, took under 9 million votes, about 11.8 percent. Putin won over 56 million, according to official results.
Critics objected that the 2024 vote would run over three days, from March 15 to 17, saying the longer window made transparency harder to guarantee. In November 2023 Putin tightened the rules for covering the campaign, and some independent outlets were barred from polling stations.
The Kremlin says he has overwhelming public backing and that Russia does not want lectures from the West about democracy. Opinion polls put his approval around 80%, higher than before the war in Ukraine.
Sources
- Russian Elections: How Long Can Vladimir Putin Rule & Who are His Challengers | Explained – News18
- Vladimir Putin Is Running for Reelection in 2024
