Russia’s Future - The Nixon Center

Although Russia’s next presidential election is still over two years away, the campaign has already begun and there is real competition between President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, according to Igor Yurgens, Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Development and an informal advisor to President Medvedev. Yurgens described this competition as a de facto primary election to select the nominee of Russia’s “party of power”—the United Russia faction that Putin has led since stepping down from the presidency in 2008.  Still, Yurgens said, the victor in this primary will ultimately be determined by Putin himself.

Yurgens acknowledged that he and his institute advise the Russian President—Medvedev is the chairman of INSOR, though the institute is entirely privately funded (albeit often with government encouragement)—and expressed hope that Medvedev and Putin could compete directly in a popular election, something he considered quite unlikely.  While Yurgens did not believe that Medvedev could defeat Putin in a free and fair election in 2012 absent genuine domestic and international policy triumphs, which would be difficult to achieve, he argued that this would be a major step forward for Russia, that it would make Medvedev a much stronger candidate in the country’s next election, and that it would help to build a system with dominant center-right and center-left parties.