Will Putin get married? In Belarus?

Brilliance and poverty of the format of a large press conference of the leader - Andrey Kolesnikov watched the show

For the 14th time, it is not easy to listen to reports about the brilliant situation in the economy, about the growth of milk production and overgrown fields, assessments of the situation in the genre “on the one hand”, “on the other hand” also provide little information, so Putin’s next press conference will be remembered for his enigmatic matrimonial phrase. Like, as an honest person, he is obliged to marry someone there.

Did the manager have in mind his own plans in the field of private life? Was it a joke - and not a very good one at that? Politically, as everyone knows, Putin is married to Russia. Moreover, if in 1999 it was still a civil marriage, then since 2000 it has acquired a completely legal status. But there are older and younger wives. Maybe it was about the fact that politically one should also marry Belarus - two spouses in one bottle, and the status of the Sultan is quite preserved? (By the way, in the collection of specific, that is, close to idiotic, questions, there was also a question about Putin's attitude towards Ataturk.)

Crafty figure

Putin has a good memory for numbers, but it has been known since perestroika that they can be crafty. Let's take - just for example, to understand how this person (and his servants) work with numbers - the topic of real incomes of the population, which the head of state, of course, could not ignore. The President promised that by the end of 2018, real incomes of the population would grow by half a percent. Few. But the main thing is growth. Seems like a trend.

But according to the results of January-November, real incomes fell by 0.1%. And this is after the spring-summer growth of this indicator as a result of payments to pensioners of 5,000 rubles and other gifts to the population in connection with the mobilization phase of the presidential election campaign. Putin reports on the permanent growth of official salaries. And this is in a country where, as the previous social deputy prime minister Olga Golodets put it, there is an incredible number of unrecorded citizens living in the unobserved sector of the economy and earning their livelihood by no means official salaries. Real incomes fell for four years in a row - from 2014 to 2017, there is a suspicion that even Rosstat will not be able to follow the president's instructions and draw 0.1% growth in 2018. The main thing is that this, in principle, does not give anything, because the fall was extremely deep, and the share of the population with incomes below the subsistence level in January-September 2018 increased even compared to 2017, not to mention the pre-crisis 2013: then this indicator was 10.8%, now it is 13.3%.

So we're working with numbers. Although it is clear that the first person should exude optimism, but not on the basis of pessimistic phenomena.

Animation instead of multipliers

Judging by the foreign policy part of the press conference, Putin is ready to rattle weapons very loudly, but not ready to fight. Donbass is part of Ukraine. The sailors captured after the Kerch incident will remain in prison until the end of the criminal investigation. The president's attitude towards Ukraine was reminiscent of a sociologist's interest - how many percent there are and what contributes to the increase in the rating of Petro Poroshenko, and what does not.

By the way, for Putin himself, the activity approval rating (as interpreted by the Levada Center) has been holding on to a plateau of 66% for the third month (October, November, December). And no amount of patriotic hysteria can budge him. Emotions about raising the retirement age are gone, but the sediment in the form of a return of Putin's rating to pre-Crimea values ​​remains. And even the heroic boarding of the enemy Ukrainian boat did not impress the public at all. There appears to be more focus on "growing" real incomes.

Ratings cannot be raised by war, despite the fact that the president allowed private armies of cooks to fight if it complies with the law, which does not exist. (It turned out along the way that Prigozhin does not serve in the FSO, and therefore does not have the right to be called a Kremlin chef.) Therefore, in the foreign policy part, Putin was not exactly peaceful, but spoke in the spirit of the pop genre master Velurov from Pokrovsky Gates: “Let the arsonist hiss and cries - the dove flies. Resources remained only for animation (about missiles), but not for multipliers (economic, which give real growth).

Well, and, finally, about the sad. Either there is nothing to ask Putin about, or there is really nothing to tell him about, but there was no actual journalism at the event called the press conference. There were thanks for something - for example, for congratulations on the 100th anniversary of "Rural Life". Demands to bring enemies to justice - a proposal to recognize natural persons as foreign agents - too. Actually, there were only a few professional journalistic questions.

And this says a lot about the position of what is still metaphorically called the media in authoritarian regimes.