General director of the All-Russian Public Opinion Studies Center (VTsIOM) Valery Fedorov
Photo: Sergey Mikheev
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Russians Want Peace
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev need not make drastic changes in foreign policy, but the public sees a need for “greater balance” in relations between East and West, a new poll by the All-Russia Center of the Study of Public Opinion (Russian abbreviation VTsIOM) has found. The previous president’s foreign policy suited people well enough, although it was not as popular as the president himself.
Not even half of the public has ever said of former president Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy that it “approved it on the whole.” The peak of approval was 46 percent, which came in January of this year at the height of the election campaign. That figure has fallen to 41 percent by April. During the same months, the portion of citizens who “disapproved on the whole” of the country’s foreign policy rose from 8 to 12 percent. A mixed review was given stably by 36-37 percent of respondents.
Moreover, 46 percent of respondents thought the new president should not alter the country’s foreign policy course, whereas 36 percent thought that he should. Nearly half of respondents expect the world situation to remain unaltered during Medvedev’s presidency, 26 percent expect improvement and 5 percent expect it to worsen. The remaining 21 percent were unable to speculate on the question.
There was some difference of opinion noted in the definition of “improvement.” The largest group of responds (28%) thought that Russia should improve its standing in the former Soviet Union. Somewhat fewer (17%) were in favor of greater integration with Europe. Those respondents tended to consider themselves materially well off and tended to be among the younger respondents. An equal number of respondents, who also tended to be young and prosperous, thought that Russia should draw closer to other new economic powers, that is, Brazil, India and China. Only 9 percent favored strengthening the strategic partnership with the United States. Twenty percent of respondents thought Medvedev should pursue a “tougher” foreign policy than Putin had.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of May 16, 2008
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