More Parsing Poulos Predictions

His seventh:

Two words: Putin and Medvedev. When the going gets weird, a wise man once said, the weird turn pro, and when the Russian economy tanks as the price of oil craters, Russia’s historically vicious world of pro politics will turn positively monstrous. Medvedev will pull a Palin and go rogue, offering Europe the chance of a lifetime: a friendly Russia given a free hand in the Caucasus and Asia in exchange for admission to the EU in everything but name. Putin, of course, will not go down without a fight, or at least a quiet sushi dinner.

Present-day politics in Russia reminds me a bit of Lázaro Cárdenas' six year in the Mexican presidency. Like Medvedev, he arrived as the perceived puppet of a former president, in this case the Jefe Máximo de la Revolución, Plutarco Elías Calles. But instead of being pulled this way and that, Cárdenas outmaneuvered Calles, building his own base of power while eroding Calles', to the point that he had no need for his erstwhile patron. The cold war between the two was eventually resolved by Calles' exile to California in 1936. In supplanting Calles, Cárdenas ended his domination over the federal government. By voluntarily relinquishing the presidency at the end of his term in 1940, he established the (mostly) peaceful succession of the Mexican presidency. Anyone worried about the prospect of two more decades of Putin should hope that Medvedev turns into a Russian species of Cárdenas.