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Yeltsin won't seek 3rd term in 2000
September 1, 1997
Web posted at: 2:09 p.m. EDT (1809 GMT)MOSCOW (CNN) -- Russian President Boris Yeltsin announced Monday that he would not run for a third term, saying he would make way for a younger, more energetic candidate.
"My term ends in 2000, I will not, of course, run again. A younger generation will come, more energetic," Yeltsin, 66, told children on the first day of their school year.
Yeltsin was elected to a second term in July 1996 despite worries about his health. He underwent a quintuple heart bypass operation on November 5.
Russia's post-communist constitution, passed in 1993, allows the president only two terms in office.
But some of Yeltsin's supporters reportedly had been looking for ways to allow him to seek a third four-year term.
Yeltsin's comments are likely to boost jockeying for the 2000 presidential election.
Among the possible successors to Yeltsin: Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who was defeated by Yeltsin in the second round of the 1996 election.
Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty contributed to this report.
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