well. it's technology innovation all the mr beilin means around russia we've got the future covered. peace soon which brightened. soon from feinstein crashing.

planes down totty don't come. to keep the stupid. thing to. blow in welcome across the uk i'm beautiful about the return of lot of mir putin to the russian presidency how did the campaign change russian politics how will russia transform over the next sixty years and has a new dialogue started within society about the country's future. to take. cross-talk a new period in russian politics i'm joined by john laughlin in paris he is director of studies at the institute of democracy in cooperation in london we have married a chef the she is the chief editorial writer and a columnist at the independent and here in the studio with me is ben eris he is editor in chief of business new europe or across the uk rules in effect that means

you can jump in anytime you want but i'm going to go to you first here in the studio was this election a game changer how what was this election different from previous elections it was different in the sense that you know it was a lot more democratic in some versions and it's it had to play to the gallery in the way that he has done before i think the bench is a good thing yes yes i think the big change is you know up until this election it's in has been above politics and he hasn't been a politician it's just the president whatever you want to call him however the demonstrations you know he was dictating the debate i see. i think this is important and then everybody talks about whatever he chose the difference with this election is that he did the demonstrations and pulled him down into the process and then he's lost control of all the pain and so he's become. responsible accountable in the way that he never has before which is not to say that he's responsible accountable in the way that we have in the west nevertheless it was the beginning

of real politics if you like which is just a beginning ok joe what do you think about that at the beginning of real politics in russia because i mean i would probably go as far as dead but i do i think there is a dialogue happening here why worry about is that the opposition won't engage mr putin once he takes office again that's a worry here but there certainly is a conversation going on in russia now. yeah i mean it's possible and certainly the western media have made an awful lot of these demonstrations although we should never forget that they. in principle represent a fairly small if not tiny select section of the russian electorate my view on the result is that it's actually a mixed result of course it's a victory for putin a dozen hellride held a new era because clearly he's been in power in one form or another since the year two thousand or indeed since one thousand nine hundred nine but it's a mixed result for him for two reasons firstly because of course the turnout was not particularly high that can have various explanations either apathy or

a sense that nothing will change. and the other reason why it's a mixed result is that his popularity which of course is undeniable is at least in part due to the weakness of his opponents are not wishing to detract all rain on his parade because i think he is a very considerable statesman but the fact is he is also blessed with having weak opponents and i think one of the reasons why there might be a change that the kind of plan has referred to an evolution in russian politics is from the very banal reason that the memory of the one nine hundred ninety s. is of course fading when he was elected back at the beginning of his first presidential term he got seventy percent of the vote in two thousand and that was largely because he was seen as someone who would take control the memory of those years is going and now he will have to fight on his own record he cannot he cannot for long continue to preserve prevent and present himself well because the only way variance i think there's a good you know if you think i think that's good i mean every politician should

have to defend their record marriage of course you see you marry so you know what you think about that i mean that's that's perfectly fair that's normal politics ok . absolutely that's no more politics i mean i agree partly with ben and i agree partly with john too i think there's been a fatal weakness of the opposition which some people will blame on the way that cotton has governed all root for the last twelve years. other people and i think i would agree with her more to say that it's been simply a weakness of the system since the fall of communism that it simply takes a very long time. real politics to develop and i think we have seen quite a landmark on the way to real politics through this campaign and then you want to jump in there i mean one of the things i think is very interesting here is that there's been an enormous amount of focus on the liberal art of opposition which fair enough that's what western media likes to cover but one issue i think that is

not in kabul enough and i think the other half of the story is the silent majority is beginning to speak beginning to stir a little bit here this is the conversation i'm talking about. you know i mean all of us have said in war it's a process it's evolution you know russia is changing in the ninety's it was a basket case and chaotic today it's more or less a normal country you have before you had an intellectual opposition that was arguably puts it in principle now you have a popular opposition and what that means is that people in the ninety's they were concerned with surviving and today they have a job or career and children birthrates going shoots you know and they're starting to worry about normal things like property rights government services education pensions and they want to be more say but this is a process i mean i think we can rule arab springs change and what we're talking about because in the meeting the people who are protesting you know they want to

preserve their prosperity and that's key to them and so nobody wants the chaos of a violent regime change indeed they are actually quite happy to keep it in inches. but they want him to be more accountable to listen to him so now it becomes very interesting going forward his food to the hassles you know i mean i mean is it being said i find problematic about the opposition is that anybody but putin attitude which is very counterproductive john larkin if i can go to you because every even the putin to tractors would be needed before the election he was by far the most popular politician in russia but you can still having said that you still can't have a slogan anyone but putin i mean it's contradictory and it's certainly counterproductive ok what i worry about is that they want to want to engage the new president well when they say that it's a red it's a rift it underlines the weakness doesn't it because that's the only thing they agree on in the western media we concentrate exclusively on the liberal opposition but the fact is that when you look at the blogosphere and when you leave certain

circles in moscow also in petersburg the main opposition to putin is not liberal at all it is precisely illiberal it is more nationalistic it is more and he western it is more conservative than the people who demonstrated at christmas time and you know it's only in this distorting prism of western analysis that the liberal opposition have linsky outlook and so on are put forward as if they were the only people opposing him they are not various yesterdays of his vision of the biggest opposition party as we know is the communist party ok mary franco you wrote a very interesting article right before the election and you talk about a generational divide and i think it's very interesting here because there's a lot of young people here and it's already been mentioned this program about the one nine hundred ninety s. ok how bad the one nine hundred ninety was what they don't remember that ok and maybe they their parents haven't been able to convey it too well because no one lot of people don't want to remember about those miserable years how do you think this is going to play out because i've seen a lot of young people here even around me very idealistic and they do like somebody

ideas of the opposition but are they going to be totalistic and not being engaging in a new political reality. well i think there's two things that i'd like to say here i mean first of all that there are many layers in this generational differentiation in russia today there is the generation that remembers the bad old days of communism then there's the group that remembers as it were the bad old days of the ninety's and then there they're the younger people who was spared both of those and who now seem to be looking forward and wanting to engage in politics and who've been facilitated in this by social media by the internet and by all the things that didn't exist before which allow people to speak to each other and exchange ideas who are physically in very different places so that's the first thing i think it's worth saying. the second thing i think is that the.

ideals if you like of the new generation are based on a decent standard of living this is something that the previous two groups the groups the ninety's and the groups the the soviet era groups really didn't have and i think. a lot of people in russians in the blogosphere were speaking about the effect or the affinity between the situation in russia and the situation in arab countries which gave rise to the arab spring and they said well you know we have a lot in common with because we had political stagnation we didn't have complete freedom of speech etc etc but at the same time often the same people are saying yes but they're completely different from us because they are a lot of unemployed undereducated young people especially young men who have no prospects and whose only solution as it were was to go out in the streets and

protest we have very different prospects and we don't want revolution we want something we want a change. but we don't want a revolution we don't want to break things down and it's an aspirational evolution that people are talking about here yeah i mean this is an idea that to do with the arab spring i think this is mary made the point i mean you know the arab spring was driven by a quarter of the population in any one of those countries was under the age of twenty five and a large majority were unemployed and in russia the inflation and sort of the unemployment rate is a twenty year and this revolution as such is being driven by the middle class and middle aged people professional people that have benefited over the last twelve years in the white house intern yeah no i mean you know ironically the people protesting on the liberal side are some of the main beneficiaries of all the changes that have happened but this is why this is going to be you know revolutions run with this is going to be very civilized you know it's a christian minority cajun engaging the government and the government needs to

engage back and i mean that's the sea change here is that the government up until this point has been concerned with the elites with getting the economy back on its feet which is talking about big companies monitor and so have you and we've now gone past that point and now it needs to start engaging with the people and the small companies and their employments and start raising standards of living and securing property rights and dealing with government services you know the normal less normal aspects here ok if it were good but before the break you think mr putin will deliver well it's difficult to say i think the short answer is yes he has do. i think you'll find a lot to criticize about it but then you know the twenty years i've been covering russia this place is continuously gone forward i mean it's never done it dramatically and the p.r. has been awful but it's made continuous progress which is why we have this middle class complaining today ok we're going to go to a short break now and after that bridge will continue our discussion on russia's

new president's day our. today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world is seeing from the streets of canada. shank operations are all day.

wealthy british style. market finalists come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cars are the no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to the report on r.t. . can start. to prosecute about your mind you were talking about the results of the presidential election in russia. led. to take you. live. ok john i'd like to broaden this out

a little bit here we don't have much reaction coming from western capitals about the return of water near putin obviously we saw in media that they weren't very happy about it and governments around the world have a pretty much sneered at this election though it's probably the most striking transparent one russia's ever had and it was by a mere putin that would benefit if with a good clean election in only suffer if there were major regularities what's next now i mean is anybody going to call that amir putin say hey vlad congrats to look forward to seeing you in g eight. well there might be a phone call from peking or somewhere like that but indeed you're right in your question to suggest that the real reaction from the western leaders is going to be pretty tepid we know what their reaction is going to be because they started to give their reaction back in september as soon as putin announced that he was going to run for the presidency and within a nanosecond the warm words that had been directed at medved if the past four years were instantly dropped and russia was once again in the doghouse and since then the

coverage and the political comment the comment by political leaders on the russian election has i think it's fair to say been systematically negative and sarcastic and condescending every single report that i've seen this morning about the election victory. couples it with allegations of their or the same allegations of course which were made systematically after december and whatever the truth of those allegations. i don't think the reporters are generally very interested in the truth of them the fact is that they stick and since the election in december since the list of local election december the opposition strategy and the west strategy has been to make that allegation stick at all costs knowing that putin will be reelected and therefore try to sabotage his presidency from the very beginning by making these claims and by trying to tarnish his election as having been unfairly gained you know larry unfortunately i think that the go ahead go ahead john. and i

was going to say unfortunately that had been something of a sea change i think once obama was elected so from the end of two thousand and eight early two thousand and nine the relations were pretty good really from that point of view i'm talking about relations with the west but which by by the mean by the way is by no means the whole of russian foreign policy but that's what we're going to talk about but i think we'll now go back to the period before that because it's clear that the west absolutely hates a lot of effort and mary if i go to you i'm one of the things i found very interesting remember i was interviewed on b.b.c. and there was some one thing going on between the united states and and in russia and i was asked by the correspondent said you know you know putin doesn't really he's very harsh with his words when he talks about foreign policy particularly united states and i said well it's kind of popular among russians in his marriage right unlike yeltsin unlike a bunch of putin actually cares about public opinion at home ok he doesn't care if what americans think about him or brits or anybody else he really doesn't care he cares about russians ok i mean this is one of the things that irritates the west because you know

a lot of me are sensitive to their sensibilities and their red lines and all of that. i'm not sure they even think about it that far and i think that what is often missing. i think the word often missing from the western view of it in and from russian politics is the idea that there is a domestic audience to play to in russia as there is in america as there in in europe. the idea that putin when he when he's speaking before the election is speaking in an election campaign context is something that is simply it's not taken into account when you talk when you look at the word is using at the moment the meetings that he's having the speech that he gave yesterday for instance to the israel lobby in washington these are pretty election that had to be seen in that context and yet when people talk about putin and look at how he behaves and look at

what he says they completely disregard the fact that he was in a pre-election situation i saw only one report in connection with the russian stance on syria which said you have to remember that. speaking to voters before an election and that this sort of thing goes down well in russia i think it's it's unfortunate we've got to get used to the fact that there is politics there is public opinion in russia it's interesting we saw my russian friends so don't listen to these republicans you know because if you're just campaigning you know they are likely to keep their word later but for the foreign investors i don't have those. marriages said i mean this should be a shock in the west and so much is putin is playing to an audience he's delivering a message why because he wants them to vote for him this is you know the democratic process and so much is actually why is the with so and i think me against putin

they hate him i think it's because it is a clash of systems here i mean the assumption behind. criticism is that russia is not democratic the problem is it's not so much that russia is what i mean i think it's managed democracy system whereby you've got a transition and the debate that we should be having that we're not even beginning is the west is looking and saying russia's political system is rubbish and discounting the people with discounted putin it's not you know the same system as was in full and open democracy but i think you know it's take that attitude is maybe naive or at least it's not what happening here what we're talking about is a transition if we accept this economic need for economic transition at a time what putin's arguing is that there's a need for a political transition to. this is not turkmenistan where they present just returned with ninety seven percent of the vote one hundred percent of the duma. and it's not the ukraine either which is but then you know there's a ukrainian it experiment where they did go to for political. chaos and it's chaos

and war over the globe which is clearly going to steal the country back in october and elections there and i think putin's looking at these situations and saying that we need a transition there's no point introducing civil society if we don't have the institutions to ensure the management of the economy afterwards and you know you can argue about the pros and cons of that but no one's even beginning this debate about what he's attempting to do and it's a very interesting debate a change in political system here is unprecedented in history and all the west can do is like your systems rubbish it's not our system and so we did that again and i guess john the edge if russia were really to imitate the united states which i have super pacs right. just by i don't really agree that the i don't really agree that the reason the real reason for this bad blood is that russia's electoral system is rubbish i'm not sure if that was what ben wanted to say but i certainly

don't agree with it though i think he said i think it was really saying it was best to caricature in the west. but i think the truth is the truth is really very uncomfortable indeed and that is that in europe and possibly in america but certainly in europe in western europe democracy is in very evident retreat it is we in the european union who are living in a system of managed democracy although i wouldn't even put the word democracy in that we are after all in an organization where the greek government was overthrown at the very moment when it said it wanted to have a referendum on its bailout plans two countries have been effectively placed in political administration every treaty that is new that is that every new treaty that is. it is signed is not submitted to referendum for ratification and europe does everything to prevent such referendums we are at the people who are in retreat

we're in a negative transition if you like and i think that might be one of the reasons why russia is so hated it's a sort of it's europe's guilty conscience in a sense which is that opera which is in operation here mary i think we've had a really interesting discussion here and i think ben has really hit a really important point is that you know i've lived here for twelve years and watched evolution here i've seen pendulums move back and forth a little bit tweaking this tweaking now we know that they're going to change the way governors are elected again threshold for political parties i mean they are thinking about these things here they are people are protesting saying that they want change we see the political elite reacting to this i mean i guess for some people here politically in russia it's the same faces that's the issue that they have a problem with. yes and i think this is one of the judgments maybe that was made in september when. when if nominated. for them to be the united russia candidate for president again because i think there is going

back to the generational issue there is actually a big big difference in the background and the way of looking at the world between protein and and i think that europeans and americans maybe were happier with the sort of stance and the sort of language that maybe it was you think. and i think that the new generation of russians or at least the norm extreme nationalist new generation of russians also felt more comfortable with me jeff than they feel with potent and that is one of the reasons for the great disappointment in the way that it expressed itself in protests through the autumn after the parliamentary elections and probably that was the later today ok then if i go to you before we enter the program and you're in touch with the business community obviously but it's this was interested this result in happily could you explain the reasons yeah i mean it's stability that's what it's in office i mean business not so concerned

with you know democracy an expression of. people's desires that they want stability they want to continue the economic boom that's been driven by. rising incomes of the consumers or that they can serve them and they want predictability that's going to happen they want to see more forms and with socialism that in you know we had twelve years of prosperity and so we look forward to another four years and prosperity and so i think we're pretty happy nevertheless the security is going to be just as easy this time for is getting more difficult i mean the new new economic there's a consensus amongst all the locals and your economy more than where it's needed. he said that though i think the investors on the whole you know provided this process wasn't violence you know that it grinds away at that in which is their stated aim and this is very healthy and this is also what russia needs for the long term

prosperity otherwise we're facing the prospect of stagnation and of course you know . so i think you know nice gradual transition the business community is very happy and seeing i mean already seen in florida i think that's been picking up ok john i'm going to give you the last word here what are the next six years going to be like twenty seconds well i think that's the biggest challenge is probably the judicial system and you know when you're talking about foreign investment and the business climate i think that's what the that's the kind of stability which is the most important it's justice from the judicial system and justice from the local administration and i think those are the two big areas where russia is probably at it's we case that is the biggest challenge and then of course there are huge international challenges above all the international monetary system which is in chaos and needless to say the middle east so it's an uncertain world but i think that the occasional certain well certain world of people and this is when mr putin

wants to deal with here many thanks to my guest today in paris london here in the studio and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember. led mission in the cretaceous three per cent store charges three the arrangement three per studio three legoland sleazeball to live video for your media projects a free media party dot com. if

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