The budget pie is shrinking. There isn’t enough money to go around, while the spending listed under the category of “this is what we have to steal” is inelastic—it does not shrink proportionally. Protected budget items, so to speak.
Now pensioners have taken to the streets as well. Apparently, they forgot that these days an unauthorized rally and blocking a road can mean criminal charges. Or they decided that wasn’t important.
The pensioners’ slogans are not exactly tolerant.
And here is Sochi. Pensioners blocked the city’s main thoroughfare:
One can, of course, argue about whether in-kind benefits should be converted into cash payments and which public transport fare concessions should be preserved. But at its core, the dispute between the pensioners and the authorities looks like this: why is it possible to give Putin’s son-in-law a billion dollars from the National Wealth Fund, but not let us ride the bus for free.
And this kind of rally-as-dialogue will happen more and more often.