1 July, protest against planned pension reform, Omsk. Source: Navalny.com.Finally, Russian citizens can taste some of the bitter fruits of the Kremlin’s confrontation with the west: it’s clear that the government’s planned pension reform are just the first of a series of coming unpopular policies.
On the one hand, having transformed the presidential elections into a test of loyalty, Vladimir Putin now has, in effect, the right to make any move. But on the other, the authorities have nowhere to move – there is no money, as Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev famously noted.
The pension reform is thus a kind of testing ground, an opportunity to develop new forms of propaganda to accompany decisions by the authorities which will definitely be unpopular among Russian society. Even according to polling data from VtsIOM (hardly the most independent of pollsters), up to 80% of people surveyed are against the reform. And this makes the reform doubly interesting.
