Citing FDR, Putin Hints of Return to Presidency

(Sept. 7) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday dropped his strongest hint so far that he might run again for his old job as president by invoking the lengthy political career of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The prime minister told reporters and foreign policy analysts that he hasn't ruled out running in the 2012 election and compared himself to FDR, the only elected American president to serve more than two terms in the White House.

"U.S. President Roosevelt was voted in four times in a row because this did not contradict the American constitution," Putin said, according to Agence France-Presse, after being asked whether another term in the Kremlin would damage the Russian constitution. (The U.S. Constitution was amended in 1951 to limit presidents to two terms.)

"Neither I nor President Medvedev will do anything that runs counter to the basic law, the constitution of the Russian Federation," Putin, 57, said during a media summit at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. "We have talked about what we will do in 2011 or at the start of 2012 several times. We will act according to the real situation in the country, from what we have done, from the mood of the country."

However, he added that "it's still too early to talk about this."

Putin -- who was first elected president in 2000 -- was prevented from running for the top job during the last vote, in 2008, as Russia's constitution says a president can serve only two consecutive terms. But after a four-year break from the post, the former KGB agent would legitimately be able to run again in 2012, so long as current President Dmitry Medvedev agrees to step aside.

This isn't the first time that Putin has publicly referenced the Roosevelt. Asked about his vision for the country in October 2007 -- shortly before he anointed Medvedev as his successor -- the then Russian president said he admired the way FDR battled tycoons and ended the Great Depression with his New Deal, which "benefited ordinary citizens and the elites and eventually brought the United States to the position it is in today."

At the time, The Washington Post speculated that Putin wanted voters to view him as a Russian Roosevelt who had rescued his nation from the chaos of the 1990s, bested its power-hungry oligarchs and would secure its glorious future, thus allowing him to return for a third term.

Although Putin took on the more junior role of prime minister in 2008, many experts believe he will reclaim the presidency in 2012. His summer break has certainly seemed like one long presidential campaign, designed to persuade the Russian public that he's a can-do action man. Putin has been filmed fighting forest fires, shooting a gray whale with a crossbow (he was tagging the animal as part of an ecological campaign) and driving a Lada -- the country's national auto -- across the Siberian wilderness.

And Putin appeared positively presidential at Monday's media summit in Sochi, where he fielded questions on everything from his thoughts on foreign policy to Russia's future prospects. He argued that a solution must be found to its current standoff with Georgia -- which Russia went to war with in 2008 -- as "Georgia was the dominant power in the region."

He also weighed in on the ongoing debate over whether Vladimir Lenin should be removed from his mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square. Two-thirds of Russians want the former Soviet leader -- responsible for millions of deaths during the Russian civil war -- buried before the centenary of the 1917 revolution, but millions of communists believe he should remain in the public tomb.

"There is a time for everything," Putin said, according to Reuters. "A day comes, and the Russian people will decide how to deal with it."