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BRUSSELS: French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner
expressed concern Tuesday at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
plans to take the post of prime minister, although the EU said it
was an “internal” matter.
Kouchner, one of the few senior
international politicians to publicly express misgivings, told
Europe 1 radio that there were not enough counterweights to the
power of the Kremlin in Russia.
He said US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice had been right to express reservations in a
newspaper interview about the political situation in Russia.
“Condi Rice was absolutely
right to highlight that this is an ‘unprecedented procedure,’”
he said.
Asked about the absence of
counter veiling powers to the Kremlin, Kouchner—who paid an
official visit to Russia last month—said: “Unfortunately, there
is not enough.
“The opposition is not taken
sufficiently seriously, the country has lots of difficulties and the
whole world knows it.”
Rice told Monday’s New York
Post she was worried about the concentration of power in Russia.
It was not clear if she was
speaking before or after Putin’s announcement to delighted
delegates of the United Russia group Monday that he would lead them
into December’s parliamentary election.
That makes him a frontrunner for
the prime minister’s position. The constitution prevents him from
running for a third term as president and some observers see this as
his way of staying in power.
After the announcement, the White
House said only that this was an “internal affair” so long as
the elections were free and fair.
The European Commission,
currently locked in tense negotiations with Moscow over the EU’s
dependence on Russian gas, also preferred to keep a diplomatic
silence on what it also described Tuesday as an internal matter.
“The commission has no comment
to make on that particular situation,” said spokesman Johannes
Laitenberger.
“That is internal Russian
business,” he told a press conference in Brussels.
According to Michael Emerson of
the Center for European Political Studies in Brussels, Monday’s
move by the president should not have come as such a political
earthquake.
“Everybody should have been
expecting some twist to enable Putin to stay in power virtually
indefinitely,” he said.
“He is not quite president for
life—but he’s not doing that badly. It’s obviously a
perversion of the intentions of the Russian constitution but he will
get a mandate to become PM, and then president for another two
terms.”
“That gives us another 10 or 12
years [of Putin],” he said.
--AFP
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