Putin's Grip on Power
25 years ago, on March 26, 2000, Vladimir Putin won the Russian presidential election, making him the official successor of Boris Yeltsin, who had resigned three months earlier.
Putin, who was prime minister at the time and had served as acting president after Yeltsin's resignation, won 53.4 percent of the vote in what is widely considered the last truly competitive presidential election in Russia to date.
Over the next 25 years, Putin would only tighten his grip on power. To comply with the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms, he switched to the role of prime minister in 2008 while his ally Dmitry Medvedev occupied the presidency. After amending the constitution to extend presidential terms from four to six years starting in 2012, Medvedev made way for Putin to run in the 2012 presidential election. Putin won 63.6 percent of the vote, securing a third term in Russia's highest office.
After winning re-election again in March 2018, Putin once again faced hitting the constitutional term limit in 2024. To address what became widely known as "the 2024 problem", Putin proposed wide-ranging amendmends to the constitution in January 2020, which included a change to presidential term limits. While making the rules stricter on paper by limiting Russian citizens to two presidential terms in their lifetime - disallowing the shuffling between positions that Putin had employed in 2008 and 2012 - the amendmend was designed to disregard past or current terms, effectively erasing Putin's first four terms. The new rule paved the way for Putin to run again in 2024 and to seek re-election in 2028 if he so chooses, which could keep him in power until 2036.
If Putin remains in power beyond 2030, he would become Russia's longest-serving leader, surpassing Joseph Stalin, who led the Soviet Union for 29 years between 1922 and his death in 1953.