Russian president Vladimir Putin and his defense minister General Sergey Shoygu observe military exercises in Anapa on the Black Sea, March 29 (Presidential Press and Information Office)

My latest article for the Atlantic Sentinel analyzes this week’s dismissal of Russian deputy prime minister Vladislav Surkov, formerly the Kremlin’s chief ideologist, and postulates a trend of President Vladimir Putin removing the more liberal members from his inner circle, tilting the balance of power in favor of former spy and security agency officers who tend to be conservatives or hardliners.

The rightward shift might be one of perceived necessity, I argue. “Increased oil and gas production in North America and Gazprom’s antitrust battles with the European Union prompted Putin to shield the company from foreign legal investigations in September, deepening its dependence on the state and preventing investment from flowing into other industries.” Putin and his deputy Dmitry Medvedev continue to talk of economic diversification but precious little progress is actually made.

Politically, Putin’s regime also looks less stable. While he was still comfortably elected to a third time last year with 64 percent support, it was less than the 71 percent of the votes he got in 2004′s election. “Mainly urban and middle class Russians, whose economic prospects have improved in large part because of the reforms Putin enacted during his first two terms, are increasingly dissatisfied with corruption and nepotism at the top.”

Read the whole article online.

The reason, points out Mats Persson, director of the Open Europe think-tank, in April 30′s edition of The Telegraph, is the dichotomy between “austerity” and “growth” doesn’t exist in Germany. Rather, “the term used is sparkurs (savings course) or sparpolitik (savings politics).” The opposite is schuldenpolitik, debt politics, which is how Germans interpret the fiscal policies of south European states that have been teetering on the brink of sovereign bankruptcy.

Such schuldenpolitik is anathema to all of Germany’s politicians so even if Chancellor Angela Merkel, seen as the main champion of austerity, loses her majority in the fall, the Central European country probably won’t acquiesce.

Read the whole article online.

The consensus that emerged from the different scenarios that were proposed by the analysts was that Putin’s fall would likely be triggered by some external crisis, like a foreign policy blunder or a sharp reduction in Russian oil and gas exports, that convinces other members of the regime that the president has become a threat to their own survival.

Throughout his thirteen years in power, Putin has built a coalition of conservatives and relative liberals who reflect his own hawkish foreign policy views, grounded in Russia’s self-interest, and penchant for “managed democracy” in combination with free market economic policies. While the moderates would prefer to pursue a more pro-Western diplomacy, the conservatives do not particularly care for a further liberalization of Russia’s economy. Putin has managed to balance these interests, but if a crisis happens, the two groups could fight for supremacy—and come to regard Putin as a liability.

The outcome would likely be prolonged political instability, maybe an army coup, before a new government is tasked “with simultaneously placating urban middle class voters’ demands for true democratization and the Russian masses’ longing for stability—opposing desires that Putin himself has so far failed to reconcile.”

Read the whole article online.

Britain is an important ally for Germany in its campaign for fiscal consolidation in Europe and “strengthening” (liberalizing) the single market but while it is considering whether to stay in or opt out of the bloc, the government in Berlin has little choice but to deepen relations with Paris instead.

[T]he Germans can’t afford to risk alienating the French in an attempt to “Germanize” the rest of Europe. They may find themselves in the minority if Britain does leave and suffer a backlash against their program.

Ironically, that could lead to the very thing Cameron says he seeks to avoid: deeper economic and fiscal integration in Europe, on French terms. Read the whole article online.

This week, my first article was published in the print edition and it’s also available for online reading. I looked into the regional implications of German green energy policy.

Germany’s green-energy agenda is no doubt ambitious, but it threatens to isolate the country in Central Europe. The Czech Republic’s and Poland’s announcement that they will build switches on their borders to keep German electricity off their grids undermine the aim of creating a pan-European energy market.

Click here to read it in full.