By DPA
Moscow : Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he would accept the offer by his handpicked successor Dmitry Medvedev to become prime minister.
“If citizens give a vote of confidence to Medvedev and elect him Russia’s president, I will be ready to lead the government,” Putin said at United Russia’s party congress Monday, according to Interfax news agency.
Putin, who is barred from a third successive term in office, attended the congress of Russia’s dominant party Monday to support Medvedev’s nomination as presidential candidate for the March elections.
Medvedev, who holds a cabinet post and also chairs the board of state energy monopoly Gazprom, is likely to be elected in Putin’s place – riding on the coattails of the president’s overwhelming popularity.
More than 60 percent of Russians said they would vote for the candidate proposed by United Russia for the presidential vote.
Within two weeks of Putin’s party’s win in controversial parliamentary elections, Putin seems to have decided two of the country’s biggest political questions: who will succeed him, and his own future political role.
Putin stressed that he would take the post “without any changes to the balance of power between the parliament and presidency.”
Observers suspect that Putin would seek his decisive parliamentary majority to amend the constitution and bleed powers from Russia’s strong executive.
The soft-spoken Medvedev, 42, a graduate of the same St Petersburg law school that the president attended, has said that as a candidate he stood for “ensuring the continuity of the course set by Putin in the past eight years.”
Medeved owes his political career to his staunch loyalty to Putin, first hired into his cabinet in the early 1990s in St Petersburg, raising doubts as to whether he would come into his own as an independent leader or serve as a figurehead.
Party leader Boris Gryzlov said Medvedev had unanimously been elected as the candidate to continue the party programme called Plan Putin.