Russia's Putin: Opposition has few ideas

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the opposition movement on Monday of focusing too much on personalities and failing to discuss ideas ahead of March 4 presidential polls. Putin published a broad economic manifest on his Putin2012.ru election website entitled "Russia is concentrating: the challenges we must answer" in which he vowed to eliminate poverty and focus on social concerns if elected to a third term. But he opened the article by addressing the waves of protests that followed disputed December parliamentary elections and have turned into the biggest challenge of his dominant 12-year rule. "Today, there is a lot of talk about various forms of political renewal," Putin wrote. "But what are they proposing that we agree about? About ways of setting up rule? Of transferring it to the 'best people'? And what happens next? What are we actually going to do?" The article also ran in the Izvestia daily and represented what state media said was the first in a series of policy addresses Putin plans to publish in the Russian press. Russia's largest protests in nearly two decades originally came in response to allegations of fraud in the December 4 election to the State Duma lower house of parliament in which the ruling party clung on to a narrow majority. But their focus has increasingly turned to criticism of Putin himself and one of the main calls at a new rally set for February 4 -- exactly one month before the vote -- states simply: "How long are you going to trust Putin's promises?" Putin accused the fractured opposition movement of personalising politics to the detriment of Russian voters. "What concerns me is that we are having almost no discussions about what we have to do outside the election frameworks, after the elections," Putin said. "I think that Russian citizens should have the opportunity to not only discuss the merits and shortcomings of politicians, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but also the actual contents of policies, the programmes that specific politicians intend to implement."