And this is exactly what he did. At a grand ceremony of the ruling party, United Russia, Putin announced he would be swapping jobs with his long-serving prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, for the 2008–12 term. Immediately after that, Putin and Medvedev would swap again … but not before approving a constitutional reform to extend the president’s term from four years to six. The Putin-Medvedev arrangement was classic pseudolaw: blatantly designed to defeat a constitutional check on the accumulation of power without exactly violating it. Term limits are designed to prevent a ruler from accumulating
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