Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center comments in Vedomosti on Putin’s latest media appearances:
A president without a program, reasoning like a common man, in the unwritten memoir genre – all that against the backdrop of a political class deliberating if March 2018 means the advent of a lame duck – resembles the late Francisco Franco rather than a father of the nation confidently staring into the Crimean sunset.
Considering that the caudillo’s sunset years were the time of the so-called Spanish economic miracle (1959-1974), which finally transformed Spain from a rural into an industrial society, and considering that the Russian economy has not fully recovered from the 2014-16 recession and the Russian government expects a growth rate of just 1,5% in 2018-20, the late-Franco scenario does not look nearly as bad as Kolesnikov seems to assume on behalf of the reader.
I suggest looking for parallels in the recent history of Latin America instead.
I see you compared Putin to Getúlio Vargas back in 2005. Vargas shot himself. Here’s hoping.
Not that things improved much in Brazil after his suicide. I’d take Franco (the 1960-75 version) over Vargas but I see no signs of a technocratic government (not just the cabinet) coming to power in Moscow.
[…] that’s just a cheap, easy and false parallel that should be left to publicity-hungry historians. Besides, Franco’s regime, despite […]