0 in the clock folks like the mayor putin new legislation paves the way for him to be president for life putin argues staying in power after his term ends will be good for russia but how convinced are his critics this is inside story. Hello again im james spays hes russias longest serving leader since the soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and if youre a russian under the age of 20 youve never known another leader Vladimir Putins critics fear hes preparing to be president for life the 67 year old has backed a constitutional amendment to reset his president ial term count to 0 allowing him to run in another 2 elections the lower house of parliament passed the legislation on tuesday russians would you to have their say in a constitutional referendum next month the amendments are the latest in a choreographed process that began in january well come back to what putin said then now the kremlin leader hasnt ruled out running for president beyond 2024. But then we should go for it you may consider it inappropriate to remove from the constitution protections on the number of president ial terms but incipient that will do as a motion in principle this option would be possibly at them but under one condition if the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation gives an official conclusion thats that such an amendment will not contradict the principle as understatement of the main laws of the constitution. The former k. G. B. Officer and deputy mayor rose to power as the name successor of president Boris Yeltsin that was in 1999 when yeltsin resigned and appointed putin as acting president a few months later putin won his 1st president ial election followed by reelection victory in 2004 having served 2 president ial terms putin couldnt run again in 2008 but he stayed center stage he became Prime Minister while his close ally dmitri mir feared if was president 4 years later putin returned to the presidency for a 3rd time he serves 6 years after president ial term limit was extended that victory was followed by protests alleging voter fraud after his landslide reelection victory 2 years ago his 4th term is supposed to end in 4 years time. Lets bring in our panel of guests to discuss this further in moscow we have victor all of it shes expert at the center for actual politics in paris serge agree f. Is a professor of economics at the Paris Institute for Political Studies widely known as seamless poor and with me is there a mcdowell hes the principal russia analyst at the global Risk Consultancy various maple thought welcome to you all welcome to inside story lets start in moscow because this story is taking place in moscow victor explain to us what has happened in the last 24 hours. Sensually the. New constitutional amendments were to be added to the for the 1993 russian constitution. Was. New. To it with the state duma the lords house of the russian parliament. Members of the state duma proposing to. Put in the current russian president to have an opportunity to run for 2 more terms possibly potentially saying that since the amendments are essentially forming the old constitution. The constitutional were there that was imposed by the by the former constitution. To no longer be valid and so you could possibly potentially run for 2 more terms starting with the 2002024 election lets be clear and possibly potentially possibly potentially then be president for life some might say we shouldnt call him president putin we should call him soft. Well of course controlled the. Russian political sphere for 20 years now and. If he is allowed to have 2 more terms. And it looks like that is going to happen. Of course it does look like a of a very long term presidency or almost a presidency for life however we do not know at this point if going to choose to run in 2024 or if there are going to be other political calculations that. Taken into account in the next 4 years depending. And how the political economic. Situation develops in russia and what effect the various foreign actors are going to calve ok ok thank you very short circuit surrogate for the surrogate in paris id like to get your reaction to whats happened worth telling people that youre an academic now but you used to be based in moscow and you used to be some would say among the elite in moscow until you went into exile. Thank you very much i do agree with victor that the factual. Trap record of mr putin that such that he doesnt want to stay a step aside from our role in the country and what is now happening is the opportunity for him to run again and again in 2024 he would say my term limit clock is that he said so i can run for 2 more terms 6 years each and of course this directive elites russian can secure since constitution as now mr putin sat he will ask institutional kuharich to all doubt him even for this the 2nd of the clock is consideration learn not i would remind you that that has already happened in 1000 then he can situational court has ruled for president yeltsin president and that time there even if you get elected the 1st time as president yeltsin dear before you get then you can secure steel you cannot accept the clock so we dont have a pass at them there what mr putin is trying to dog is unconstitutional now i agree with a big part of that mr putin is the person put likes to surprise people surprise their observers so maybe he opens this opportunity for himself to run again and again. He may choose not to do that however the baseline scenario and this is exactly what everybody is expecting is that he wants to stay on after going to 2024 again in the. And now this is not something which. Is unusual everybody is expecting missed that we can try to handle 2 power as much as as longest care and 11 hour can we can absorb get our. Russian markets International Markets didnt look at this so delusional of mr putin storm limit problem was unexpected by the very fact that he will trying to find a solution that he will try to stay on that was completely expect that then as the crisis didnt look at all ok lets bring in dr here as its been said there by a surrogate a many people expected putin was going to do this at some point and in history recent history even now we have World Leaders who served a lot longer than president putin but to be in charge of a country that is that important some of the u. N. Security council its very unusual to be there for that long its worth reminding perhaps all of us who the. Other World Leaders were when putin took power Jacques Chirac in france roeder in germany tony blair in the u. K. Bill clinton in the u. S. Putins already served a very long time well naturally thats thats obviously the case but what we should be looking at here is you know putin obviously has his own intentions and his desires are my own profession i know the inside of his head so i wont tell you what those are but we should consider that there is a broader russian elite here and putin and the coterie around him the duma deputies members of the president ial administration etc are facing the same challenge that every authoritarian regime does at some point in history which is how you manage the transition from power because remember automatically its not just putin putin is the most important character but hes hes not controlling everything were looking at a constellation of elites. Its business in Politics Society and whenever you have change youre going to create new coalitions of winners and losers so while some people might improve their position from a succession to a post putin presidency others will lose and what this looks like to us is as much as this is putin grudgingly accepting 2 more terms there is also a feeling among the the russian elite as a whole that the status quo is preferable to any sort of risk of change and again weve seen this in history you know the british have comparisons are a little bit trite at this point but that was essentially why but it was kept in power long past the point where it was clear he was no longer mentally or physically capable of doing so because all of the people around him realize that a change was far more riskier than just keeping with the status quo now this storys out problems for later not only how you know eventually we are all mortal as the current circumstances her teaching us all eventually putin will have to leave the presidency now hes been there for 3540 years how do you have another leader who can maintain some sort of legitimacy or acceptance among the population in the elite and how do you keep it from just turning into again with references depression have a kind of ossified gerontocracy where you have leaders who are all in their late seventys or early eightys and thats a real challenge and its one of the paradoxes of putins power that the stronger he is within the system the harder it is for him to take this particular decision that is the transfer of power to another person and another generation of leaders so putin has said this is a possibility hes not definitely going to do another will he need now to gauge Public Opinion or does Public Opinion no longer really match or in russia. Public opinion does matter our quote of the regime and that fully agree with their oath and we need to understand this it is him as an at that great occasion we their person on top but that. Its not just food and its also people around him and the way putin runs the show or is there he is 1st for his own individual. Approval ratings eve Approval Rating so we can see these appear because the regime has to be a chef because currently he is a supreme arbiter solve in controversial because sources fall in conflicts all in theres agreements between people around town and then hes on his own coffins exactly because his Approval Ratings are still for example a client now theyre coming down and some of them are so all over theyre not published anymore and in that sounds putin is facing a major challenge yes and if hes not impossible then by 2024 his Approval Ratings are so little that he cannot run however that may also happen before or after many many years or this is something that its not its not easy to project resumes like this dont really change in that very deep but i think the boldly we know that it may change overnight and we know that you can have a lot of confidence and believe that and then the next day you have a proper strategy which finished the situation completely and that sounds good. Thus project the confidence for now but his Approval Ratings are coming down and that really matters he cares about those ratings and he needs to make things happen in the way that public keep supporting him and unfortunately as we just rightly sound the more surprised that unfortunately cannot deliver in social economic terms with the stagnation of incomes we see. Corruption which heroes in this. Its faction within him and in that sounds this it is him cannot deliver prosperity and this is some question clear down and this is why im unfortunately not happy by whats happening now not because i just like democracy or dislike of the beautiful or memory of the national but because that i care about the spirit of russia and making this decision cannot give me what respect as we discuss everything thats happened in the duma in the last few hours i think its probably worth as rewinding back to january when president putin got rid of his old cabinet asked him to resign but also at the same time he seemed to have a different opinion of where things were going to go back on the 77th anniversary of the lifting of the siege of leningrad in world war 2 a war veteran i asked him if it was time to abolish president ial term limits altogether. He was and then was didnt it would be terrible to return to the situation which was in the 1980 s. When heads of state held on to power until the end of their days we dont ensuring the transformation of power once they were not in power anymore comes thank you very much though but it would be better not to return to the situation because you seem to be in the middle of the 1980 s. Now daryn there was a lot of speculation they can buy some i dont know whether you should at the time that perhaps he wasnt going to stay as president he was going to engineer some sort of backseat driver role do you think that was his plan needs changed his mind well or read it various maple croft when we saw the combination of the constitutional amendments and the dismissal of the medvedev government was that 2 strategies were being pursued 1st off the appointment of mahatma schuster in a competent technocrat was all about pursuing a fiscally expansionary policy within the russian economy hes the new Prime Minister is the nuclei minister to goose growth to get spending going on the National Projects something that they may get a government had been consistently criticised for and the 2nd was proposing a series of constitutional amendments that were effectively designed to keep a 2nd putin from emerging to water down some of the super president ial powers that weve seen in the russian constitution while maintaining the option for putin to exercise power in some other. d position whether that be secretary of the Security Council or Something Else now the or the state council my apologies now the problem with that is that the more you keep your options open the less you do to make the necessary choices to repair the ground for one or the other you affectively defacto close off certain options and again our read would be that by trying to have it all these ways by trying to make sure that he could stay in power indefinitely if he needed to and to signal to the raw. Only that he was prepared to do that putin basically closed off the potential for a real transfer of power at this point alternately politics is about making decisions that means you open some windows by closing some doors and the constant attempts to have it both ways means that you cant really move forward at all and so what were now seeing is that a constitutional change process that was intended to to kind of diffuse power threat the regime a little bit to prevent this kind of new apex figurehead from emerging and make the rules of the game a little bit more regulated a little bit more predictable is actually coalescing into a not just super president ial isnt but super putinism if you will for the forseeable future. In my day job throughout 0 which is normally in new york covering the u. N. Diplomats tell me that the russians theyre always planning the groundwork for a number of different strategies keeping their options open diplomatically and in syria militarily is the same thing happening here putin lots of different options keeping them open or do you think in his heart of hearts hes decided to run again well. There are different options open to bush and of course he has been considering various. Options there was the socalled bellicose option where there was. There would be an agreement each possibly between moscow and minsk between russia and belarus that what allow puts in to an integrated russian state so would become the sort of super presidency the idea of that was he would become the sort of super president of 2 countries is that right yes but that of course yes but that did not work out because the president of bellicose look at that not that great of that and thats. That is still continuing with a somewhat of a worsening of relationship with but also i want to mention the Constitutional Court was mentioned it is interesting that one of the constitutional amendments that has been proposed deals with reforming the Constitutional Court and cutting the number of judges from 19 to 11 and reason that it is interesting is because now that the Constitutional Court will have to decide on the legitimacy of granting. Potential 2 new president ial terms than 1000 current judges will of course keep in their minds that the axe is hanging above their heads and if some of them vote against they may be the ones who are cut from the Constitutional Court after the uniform goes goes into effect also or with the specter of Public Opinion of course Public Opinion matters into these russian much more than it did in the soviet union in the days of the any of the british have and that might actually be playing against putin in this process of constitutional reform because he still has 4 years left until the next. In the next elections if everything goes through and the people that he had the hope that perhaps perhaps in 2024 at least then the russian people would have the opportunity or the option to choose a new president to choose a successor even if its somebody chosen by putting himself are now im not so confident about that and in fact are more leaning towards thinking that it is going to be over and over again ok let me bring in sir this point youve talked about for years until the next president ial election but also i assume in the president s mind is the next. All are meant 3 election because thats just over a year away tell us about that and also the state of the opposition right now this is actually a very uncertain. Perspective because just yesterday the members of parliament talked about but then chile hauled in the Election Center then scheduled and mr put him express the negative view on this when he arrived unexpectedly for the parliament itself so we dont even know where their election is going to be how this year next year year after so its its completely and certainly are entering unchartered waters if youre asking me if there is a position a position in todays russia is not allowed to run its a multiparty system where socalled system opposition parties to be part of this which how to present that in the parliament are all controlled by the government and in that sense its a little bit like german democratic republic there is germany which has to have a multiparty system or to this china where you have multiparty system where you can have a position parties in the parliament but this party this time not to be their position parties but their opposition parties are not registered as a position that their opposition leaders are not allowed to run and actually some some consideration or changes there were stuck in and are making sure that this people are not allowed to run in the future even more so because this of opposition this constitutional changes. Remove the authority of International Courts International Institutions over russian law including the European Court of human rights that. Be indicated the case of alex a nobleman who crossed over through all the very next against him if the new constitutional changes also does allow people who live outside of russia to run for Electoral Office and for president. Particular so in that sense in that sense if anything those constitutional changes are going in the direction that opposition parties that proposition barnabus and politicians. Cannot participate in the election you mentioned going to stop you know you mention the valmy data so that those a problem with with opposition in parliament and potential in the parliamentary vote but what about people power street protests. Well i mean thats the x. Factor at this point is that we saw with the. Moscow affair last summer the arrests that followed that and the unprecedented Civil Society opposition to that that there is this this push back i mean the notion of the russian people as passive is are unwilling to kind of take authoritarianism has always been somewhat overblown and you know the kremlin has a real problem with that in that its not even that putin is extremely popular a legitimate theres a degree of social acquiescence theres a degree of we are willing to accept this social order in this political order because we know that the risks of change are very very high. But this goes back to to everything weve been talking about when we talk about the duma lections as well you know this is virtual politics as putins previous said sir cough way to put it this is more a question of how do you rebranded united russia so its not so unpopular how do you negotiate the distribution of seats but the big problem here is and you know you talk about whether or not putin chooses to run again in 2024 in our mind thats kind of the wrong question to ask because as soon as putin leaves open the possibility of running again in 2024 he makes it inevitable because no one will step up to challenge him and to lay the groundwork to build a Winning Coalition within the elite. If you know theres a strong possibility hes going to stay in power nobodys going to take that risk were coming to the end of the program very quick predictions vic tall yes or no will putin be in power in 5 years too and yes no no no so ok yes or no. It wants to be in power but. Its not its not likely that your view will be in office and hell be in for more power but the question as to what that power will actually mean will depend a lot more on the state of the economy the state of society what strings he can pull ok thank you so much to our panel thanks to all of the guests with me. Dual in moscow victor all of which and surrogate good to have in paris putin keeps us guessing about his next move but however he does it he seems intent on not going away from the center of Power Outages or as Moscow Bureau will provide full coverage remember to catch up with the latest on aljazeera dot com and on our app on your phone to were on facebook for your comments and suggestions what subject do you want us to give the inside story treatment to you can contact us to on twitter from all the team here in london and in doha thanks for your time ill see you in this timeslot in 24 hours. I. 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