Ex-presidents of the post-Soviet states. Legal status and political practice
Despite the extensive political and legal practice of regulating the status of a president who has ceased to perform his duties, that institution still remains insufficiently studied. On the basis of the author’s methodology the article solves the problem of the correlation between the formal status and informal influence of post-Soviet ex-presidents, and identifies ex-presidency models. It considers 33 ex-presidency cases in 12 post-Soviet states in the period from 1992 to 2022 and gives a quantitative assessment for each case according to two criteria (the level of institutionalization and the level of subjectivity). The author comes to the conclusion that out of 33 cases, only 30% are characterized by staying of the ex-president in politics, and of these, only in four cases, that staying did not lead to political persecution of the former president. Legal guarantees of maintaining the ex-president’s high role in the political process in practice do not guarantee the ex-president’s safety, since as a result of a change in the balance of power within the elite; they may be revised or canceled by the new president. At the same time, the degree of political regime competitiveness also does not affect the ex-president’s protection from prosecution. Weak legislative regulation of the ex-president’s status or its absence in competitive political regimes does not exclude that presidents whose term of office is coming to an end will try to extend them in other ways. Currently, only in Russia andTurkmenistan elites have been able to ensure staying of ex-presidents in the political process without subjecting them to persecution. In all other states, the ex-presidency experience is either still absent or has an extremely negative character associated with the persecution of former leaders for political reasons. That is due to the fact that in most post-Soviet states, irrespective to the type of political regime, stable institutional practices of political competition, dialogue with opponents and guarantees of former presidents activities have not appeared.