it's now past the hour here in moscow with the voting is coming to a close in western russia after a day of tough decision making nationwide as people cast ballots for the next president and it's all been happening under the watchful eye of hundreds of thousands of observers and live what comes of every ballot box. and in the week's top stories here on calls for a cease fire in syria grow with reports of more smuggling of the arrest of more

than one hundred mercenaries fears of international meddling damascus claims it's a. gunman including quite a few french nationals. all but two e.u. leaders have signed tough new budget controls to prevent nations from running up huge debts struggling people across europe united against the cuts being imposed to save their economies. as the russians choose their next leader and it's what voters expect from the winner of a presidential election. wealthy british scientists. sometimes. markets finance scandals. find out what's really happening to the global

economy comes a report on r.t. . can. still. go in welcome across the time period of voting for the future in two days' time russians will go to the polls to elect their next president what is the nature of russia's political system how has it changed over time and most importantly is the russian voter the same can. see. to cross that the upcoming presidential election here in russia i'm joined by dmitri barber chair in the studio with me he's an independent political analyst in madrid we go to eric kraus he's an independent asset manager and author of the strategy monthly truth in beauty and in london we cross the jonathan steele he is the international affairs commentator for the guardian and all right gentlemen

crossed out rules in effect and that means you can jump in anytime you want also i'd like to read remind our panel and my viewers that because of the russian election law we cannot speak specifically about polling numbers as of the twenty seventh to sunday the day of the election so we won't be using a lot of numbers here in this program ok erich krauss if i go to you first in madrid reading western media about this election it seems like the russian voter is very unidimensional if you think there's a typical russian voter and if there is a typical one how would you describe that voter. well i would say the typical russian voter if we can use mathematical averages is one who's going to vote for mr putin. we've heard a lot in the western press about how putin was losing his popularity how well the facebook protests in moscow in the demonstrations meant that the regime was on its way out and of course when the polls which i can't give any numbers on but the polls have certainly shown

a very substantial rise and mr putin is going to sweep to victory in the first round so i understand that he is unpopular with some of the foreign powers and perhaps those people who have influence on the foreign press but in russia. overall in the country he remains very popular ok given in the studio here with me i mean how would you describe the voter because i mean if you read western mainstream media they focus a lot on what's called the opposition of the new opposition what i call the main opposition here in moscow and there are quite a few people that would probably fall into that category but it's look at the entire country i mean is it a liberal electorate a conservative electorate i mean obviously what eric had to say would say was more conservative well of course it's very difficult to talk about an average of all of it which you have you know russia is one of the most diverse countries in the world it's very difficult to generalize here but in general i would say that the general trend is the following. a typical russian of all day is

a person who lived through some very difficult times. who has been feelin some discomfort especially in the last two or three years but who is still relational and who wants to have a perspective for himself and for his children and that person he might get a little disillusioned with the government in the last three years probably at the peak of these protests it was registered by the source you all just north in december but in march last year. december it was already petering out but you know this person haven't looked at all that clearly there's no got to take it economically financially driven not politically driven or when to the end of the you know there were two or three very unpopular reforms in russia and to my mind very successful reforms there was an education reform there was a health care reform and just break in any country after days of war these are all painful changes and none of these changes is told to beneficial to everyone so

these people are tired but i haven't looked at the options the majority is going to support abortion journey that i go to i think it's interesting point that the images brought up you know the options out there i mean if there is much as western media likes to demonize wider me or putin the options out there aren't that credible aren't that interesting actually that's why i think the average russian voter is that such a person is relatively apathetic partly because they think there isn't much of a real choice and secondly because they think that he's going to win will be organized if he wins whatever the voters do so i think there's going to be probably more so even if even if he wins and even if we give even if he wins it's rigged i mean it seems to me that kind of argument caves in on itself erica taking go you i mean it's just hard for the outside world to understand the drive i mean food is popular. well there's something very embarrassing for the journalists which is since two thousand they have been warning us every issue of the economist every

issue of the f.t. about the catastrophes which are about to hit russia and the only problem with these catastrophes is they just don't seem to occur now if you read the press a few weeks ago there were these warnings that putin was finished he was done for and now the he's going to be massively reelected now. there is. apathy i agree there have been some reforms which have been deadly conducted but you've got to realize we're talking about a country which twelve years ago was at the brink of the solution was falling apart could not pay its own bills could not feed its people you now have a wealthy middle class country with an assertive foreign policy which may not please the west but tends to please the westerners so intense the police the russians so the point is that putin has incarnated both vox populi in russia russians the not the people not necessarily the upper middle class who

speak english and live in moscow and go on facebook but the old the people in the countryside the people in the smaller cities the working class see themselves in putin it's what's extraordinary is after twelve years in power he's as popular as he is and he's going to win the election by a very wide margin and i think this is going to be embarrassing for some of the journalists who were predicting is the mice you know if i go back to you one of the things i living here in moscow one of the things i find is very interesting there is a generational difference i think game about which is really spot on there there's a there's a generation that remembers the absolute agony of the one nine hundred ninety s. and then we have a younger generation of people that don't do not remember that because they were so young and they have been brought brought up with amenities and i'm talking about moscow st petersburg other major cities that you know that their western peers can identify with but then we have on the other hand a huge silent majority in this country i mean and not everyone lives in moscow and

st petersburg. well that's true but i think russia has a huge internet audience numbers of people who go on the web is probably higher than in and in many europe western european countries so that they are even if they are living you know miles away from the borders of russia they are over the internet through cyberspace to the rest of the world and i think there is a among this younger generation did you talked about the doesn't remember the disaster of the yeltsin years and that is only you know coming to the election for the first time in their lives there is a great sense that they want things to be changed they want russia to be more like other countries they want to get rid of the corruption they want to get rid of the cynicism so they see the lot of us and i think that is why some of them may not vote at all because they're disgusted with the system others may vote for anybody but putin just to register the fact that they want to change they want a different elite this one has had twelve years as you say in power maybe it's time

for a different one but it's been a very successful twelve years to relatively speaking go ahead well you know you always say if your words you know i agree with people here it is you me this is surly all right you're going to jump in with a game or. it is not and this is the people of the russian people may want change but if they want change quite frankly it's not the change the thought west wants to see if we look at the legislative elections the liberal opposition got crushed there there was some fortification of results but the overall results were maybe off by five percent they were pretty much reflected through will of the russian people now if you believe in democracy then you just have to let the people vote the way they want to and the communists. advanced quite substantially in the election and the extreme nationalists the in prepared events it was

a very very small vote for those people who won for russian can be more like the rest of the world i think the russian people's lives which is going very likely with this are a very poor there was a very very bad for the united russia party which is the ruling party i mean it wasn't even gave explosives a very very slow very well established theory so so so so this idea that people love united russia and last routine i think let's wait until the election results come through well i would. agree with you know that russia is going to be the first i agree with a lot of what jonathan just sad but you know just two years ago or i would completely agree that russian voters are a mistake now that's not the case record that's not the case you know my niece who was very young who didn't go to vault at the last election and who never was interested in politics today she works as an observer at the election she's withdraw her of stealing she just likes process of

a different view but she went there because it's interesting it's new and her if you do is i want russia to be a country where people choose their leaders. hume i'd choose put him into percentage sure she would want for him because jonathan you're right you said that younger russians are to internet and you now have a lot of influence on them i agree with you there are some people who are just angry with the government and who want to see change but they're not the majority even among the young people there are many young people who read foreign press in english or they read it on the press that some of them speak other languages and they just sneak by there to get all the foreign press which expects us to do something like an arab revolution here so there are all sorts of various you know impulse us inside russian society but in general i would say that the general trend right now is very good russia is big government and normal country in a normal country you have some young people who like to drop

a ball to government if the government doesn't all the react there's going to be a normal country just don't expect if fifteen people with a wide grievance you know or stage some kind of withdraw. at the red square on the street that doesn't mean we're going to have another one thousand nine hundred nineteen to more than just normal russians become a normal country it jonathan i mean i don't agree with him on this one i mean i think the participation level is amazing for i have lived in this country for twelve years and for the first time in twelve years people actually talk about politics i think that's fantastic go ahead. you know i think that's absolutely right and i perfectly agree with with demers into. this is only really serious and i would like to add one point which is that one must not confuse united russia with putin and i think the united defeat and it was something in the legislative elections was much more a defeat for me and frankly i think that putin swap was mishandled was

a bad idea putin should simply modify the american job in here you know we're sure i'd agree to that short break we'll continue our discussion on the approaching election. state markets. kick in if. you. will for good. science technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future covered. russia votes for president archie looks at the five running for the kremlin top job candidates. sergey mironov of fair russia on the record the former senate speaker was

a strong supporter of lot of your person for ten years but in two thousand and eleven called putin's united russia the party of crooks and fiends plan for presidency free education and health care progress of tax collections for a place governor appointments controversy previously described himself as a pro kremlin candidate ready to run for the presidency of roles. for opposing russia's accession to the w t o presidential election two thousand and twelve on party. coming across i'm going to remind you we're talking about the march fourth presidential election in russia. take.

ok gentlemen one of the things i kind of like i mean i don't like to mimic our richard nixon because that's not my political flavoring but i mean he did talk about the the silent majority and they can the rise of conservatism in the united states and it seems to me that when we when we look at these protests that are televised on russian television and you can get to watch plenty of it on youtube if you want is actually energized the silent majority because you know if you live outside of moscow and st petersburg the amenities are not is great or you're right you can be on the internet that's fine ok you can be anywhere to be on the internet but the same time the amenities and i think a lot of people say look these people in moscow they're the ones that have benefited from twelve years of this political establishment and they're complaining about it and that's energized people outside of the major cities. well i think the main thing is that the people have been energized the courtesan not doing it economically that's why it is different from the arab spring the arab spring had a strong religious element in the protests the purchase in western europe in greece

and spain and portugal it's all about economics people who you know who are seeing their living standards cut people who are mainly protesting in russia they're doing it for me for morality reasons for life ethical reasons they're not course they're not on employed and so on as you point out but but that doesn't give value their criticism doesn't mean that you should drive a bridge between your wedge between them and the rest of the country they in a sense of the leading edge because they're saying look there is too much corruption. so that himself when he was you know thought to be a powerful president unfortunately not to be such and yet what he's done about corruption almost nothing all these we disagree when i was a. graduate are still not quite as if i can write for it but i just finish the point could i just finish the point i had all these russians who go there not upper middle class you know you go only to train to from domodedovo to moscow and you see these are ordinary middle class kids who've been to sri lanka they've been to majok or they've been through

a trauma or shake or whatever it is they're not terribly wealthy but they've been abroad and they want to we come back to a country which they feel proud of and not ashamed of which many of them feel now because of the corruption in the service let me ask you this are russian of our. well i agree with jonathan on most of his points i will say that these protests are media protests. very often just people are tired of seeing the same faces on television for twelve years and i think it's understandable and they think basically understood that something has to be changed i think he realized that there was too much of the same features so you know his idea to write articles where he would explain to the people what he plans to do it was a very good a year and you know now all russians returning from a place like egypt or russia we don't have exactly they seem feeling we had twenty years ago twenty years ago i remember the feeling was terrible you know. we felt

joy you know when we went abroad and we felt depressed when we came home and now you look at the idea that well look even at the you share image of all these are not places you're ashamed of when you come back sometimes you have to pay money but this is a completely different country so indeed i would say that this is indeed an interesting situation where you have indeed some new you know impulses pushing people to be more active some of them going to cross their some of them my niece become of service but i don't expect a revolution in russia i expect gradual improvement eric you want to jump in there i think on a number of points go ahead. the way you are i think that first of all if you're flying from heathrow to to domodedovo then you've one of the prouder of russia because. the there has been so much there but this really great deal of improvement . we're talking i mean people tend to be ok they want new faces well this is not an

illusion reality show this is the governance of the country and i would suspect little a large percentage of the russian people feel well things could be better things could always be better but they are getting better and if you're coming from egypt back to russia i don't really think there's much to feel ashamed and if you're coming from now your ticket will spain where. speaking from right now is in the extremely perilous economic situation one of the problems is when we talk about russia people tend to russians in particular tend to speak like as soon as you got across the border you were in heaven and you were in countries ruled by the holy ghost now i would look at the appalling deterioration of the democratic process in the united states and to a great extent in the u.k. and the sort of economic harry carry which is being carried out in the west in western europe and maybe the russians sort of look abroad and say do we want to live like that we want to have the same problems that you do and maybe the answer

is not and if you go back you want to time when russians were ashamed to be russian look at the one nine hundred ninety s. look at the yeltsin years when basically we had a government which was very largely beholden to the west which was very popular because they were doing what washington and brussels and london wanted to do. and the situation was not a happy one and so right now i think russians can feel a certain pride in the fact their country is independent and is assertive and is increasingly wealthy you know jonathan i think one of the interesting things is that. in looking at political change of the last twenty years it's a little bit more global here is that you know when. the first putin was first president he introduced a number of political reforms that a lot of people were very skeptical about but we were talking about governors about the threshold for political parties signatures signatures for candidates and things like that and that was it put in play and it created

a great deal of stability now we're hearing these sounds that you know now they're going to ease down on some of those things there so it really would be the political route we need political reform with the dance going in the economy with the financial sector and things like that there needs to be a little bit more balance there don't you think. you know i think that was and i hope that after the election there will be some kind of clamping down on these you know all this political activity that we've seen over the last six to nine months it would be you know the pressure is on. and so on i mean i just hope that it will remain relaxed and not sort of punish people go in the opposite direction do you know what do you think about that i think that you know people you know i said repeatedly on this station that i am so happy to see a protest movement here because it gets everybody into a conversation about politics about their future of their country and we're seeing it now and i think it's healthy and i think i think the ruling elite sees that you dream about i would be very frank with you now. you know. i'm not employed

by the top unless. there is a problem with the russian position i hope there will not be any down from the government but i hauled we will see some new faces in their position is especially in the media part of what this because the media people inside their position they have been the same for eighteen nineteen twenty years they have been here for a much longer time than mr putin and indeed there is a problem in all during these meetings few people notice that when you're in these meetings and all the people in the crowd were not quite happy with the people who were standing at the podium the problem is they didn't have an alternative so i hope we will have some i would turn into not the nationalists like cruel or always do you mean war who cracked up to be a real racist just read his next. whilst article india the mystic and not these

kind of racists but you know really liberal moderate maybe social democratic european thinking people in the best of the world european not in the sense of the more than you're saying you're not ok eric if i go to you i think i'm really glad to be immigrant is that because we're looking at the nature of the i. position here there's a lot of really nasty elements in it and i think a lot of western media doesn't like to focus in on it because it's embarrassing ok and we have these cultural. communists you know socialist they want to reprivatize the economy and then you go to the other extreme that are diskin heads and you have national balsamic space it's kind of embarrassing to talk about them and it's everyone's put under the same rubric of oh they're white really nice people they drive s.u.v.s. the mayor the mayor is so great in what he says i have lived in russia for the last fifteen years and i've been basically following it for twenty and the quality of the opposition has been systematically

poor and it's now popular blame tootin for that but it was equally bad during the yeltsin years. and we take some of the people who've been lionized by the western press we have can spare of who's matter that i had or we have. no value who is clearly paid by the americans we have. there it's really very difficult to find prophet of who. can't really be taken terribly seriously. russia is not really ready for a berlusconi and his struggle to find a should does need in our position and we need political change and certainly i mean i take a counterpoint to the western press the sort of demonization of putin but he's not perfect and his mortal and we're going to political system is going to have to evolve towards a more poorly stick system and thus far i don't see it happening i'm not sure that

a russian opposition is going to be a pretty sort of western style liberal one but even if it's sort of a nationalistic. patriotic our position but one which represents the witches of the russian people this would be very important if only to provide some prospect of alternation of government in some time going forward ok jonathan if i go back to you in london i mean when you said you worry about a possible clampdown i would say just reversed i think i worry about seeing this this opposition group just tear itself apart because as usual russian intellectuals they just love to be you know alpha dog you know and you know in then people going to walk away if i can't run it then you know i'm not going to be part of it. it's not my party i'm not going to participate and we've seen that systematically for the last twenty years everyone likes to blame the current ruling elite but the fact of the matter is that these people have never been able to agree among themselves and maybe what they need is

a new face and they could in the old opposition and some of the names already been mentioned will step aside you think that's a possibility well i don't know but i mean i think there's some contradictions in what you just said on the one hand you talk about the opposition as a model of this sort of saying this opposition is hopeless two minutes later you say this opposition. has one thing in common they're against one person so it's not contradictory whatsoever after the fact then it will become very contradictory but i think i think you know i think you're out of date i mean i have these many of these protests that the speakers were chosen by the members of the demonstration on the web saying who's a very noisy here because i didn't work because they ended up with some of the most ugly characters and i'm afraid gentlemen we'll run out of time many thanks to my guest today here in the studio in london and in madrid and thanks to our viewers for watching us here i see you next time and remember crosstalk.