As expected, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin won the country’s presidential election last Sunday, but not surprisingly the poll was heavily criticised by international observers who questioned its fairness.

The western world now faces a dilemma on how to deal with Putin- Anthony Manduca

“The voter’s choice was limited, electoral competition lacked fairness and an impartial referee was missing,” said the Council of Europe’s Tiny Kox.

“There were serious problems from the very start of this election. The point of elections is that the outcome should be uncertain. This was not the case in Russia. There was no real competition and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt,” said Tonino Picula, head of the OSCE observer mission.

And in a radio interview shortly after the election, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Putin should acknowledge the seriousness of claims that the presidential election was not free or fair. Observers have also made it clear that the state media was heavily biased in favour of Putin, to the obvious disadvantage of the other candidates.

The official result showed that Putin got 64 per cent of the vote, followed by Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov with 17 per cent, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov – who many believe was put up by the Kremlin to channel some anti-Putin sentiment – with nearly eight per cent, far right nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky with six per cent and Just Russia candidate Sergei Mironov with nearly four per cent.

The election was held against a backdrop of protests and unrest, sparked by allegations of widespread fraud in the December parliamentary election in favour of Putin’s United Russia party.

Significantly, 11 candidates, including the leader of the liberal Yabloko party, Grigory Yavlinsky, were barred from the race by the Russian authorities. It is a sad fact that the candidates allowed to run against Putin were either close to the Kremlin (Prokhorov and Mironov) or not democratic alternatives (Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky). Many ­people could have voted for Putin ­simply because they felt there was no alternative.

Although most observers agree that Putin was the most popular candidate, there have been claims of irregularities in this election. Golos, a leading Russian independent election watchdog, said it had received more than 3,000 reports of voting fraud.

It said its own exit polls suggested Mr Putin had actually won just over 50 per cent of the vote, still enough to get him elected on the first round, but nonetheless with a much lower figure than the official results suggest.

It is important to keep in mind that in December’s parliamentary elections Putin’s United Russia party saw its share of the popular vote reduced from 64.3 per cent in 2007 to 49.5 per cent, and even then there were claims of irregularities in Putin’s favour. Putin’s claim to have received 64 per cent of the vote in this election therefore does not seem credible.

It is clear that Russia’s “democracy” is still very immature and has a long way to go before it can be considered normal. It hasn’t even fully come to terms with its Soviet past, which would be an obvious thing to do if it were a proper democracy.

A mixture of electoral fraud, restrictions on political competition, freedom of expression and assembly, the harassment of the independent media and a state-controlled media heavily biased in favour of the ruling party all point to Russia not being a fully functioning democracy.

I like to compare Russia’s political system to Mexico’s until 2000. For seven decades, from 1929 to 2000, the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party won every presidential election and dominated Parliament.

Elections were never fair and the country was a de facto one-party state. I am not suggesting that it will take 70 years for Russia to be transformed into a genuine democracy, and in fact the signs are that Russia is changing, especially after last December’s parliamentary elections, but Russia’s transformation will be a difficult process.

When Vladimir Putin was first elected President 12 years ago, he was seen as a source of stability after the chaotic 1990s which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, democracy was associated by many people with chaos, instability, social upheaval and drops in income, and voters then were therefore not particularly concerned with its erosion.

However, it now seems that Russia’s growing middle classes – who have made good use of the social media to get their anti-Putin message across – are becoming increasingly frustrated with the country’s corruption, cronyism, lack of transparency and excessive influence of the oligarchs.

Furthermore, the country’s economic growth, fuelled to a great deal by oil and gas exports, has slowed somewhat, leading to some discontent. The last straw for many people was when Putin announced, last September, that he would once again run for President, despite having already served two terms between 2000 and 2008 before stepping aside to become Prime Minister under Dmitry Medvedev because of Russia’s two-consecutive-term limit.

The Western world now faces a dilemma on how to deal with Putin. Russia is too important a country not to engage with, and its co-operation is needed on a whole range of international issues. Although the protests against Putin will continue, it is likely that Putin will complete his new term in office until 2018. However, Putin will not last forever, so the West must start preparing for the post-Putin era.

Europe and America must work together on how to deal with Putin while also reaching out to Russia’s democratic opposition, without giving the ­impression of interfering in Russia’s domestic affairs.

This is something the West has not yet managed to do. Perhaps Denis MacShane, a former UK Europe Minister, summed up the situation well when he recently said this about Putin: “The Germans refuse to criticise him. Mrs Clinton announced a great reset after the George Bush era. Blair rushed to embrace him. Cameron, to be fair, has been more cautious and distant. But none of this has worked.”

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