What Putin’s Russia teaches us is that the mere fact that elections take place and formally elected governments are in power does not mean that the electorate’s voice is heard. Could it be that competitive elections in the west – shaped by the manipulative power of money, disfigured by growing political polarisation and emptied of meaning by a lack of genuine political alternatives – resemble Kremlin-engineered elections more than we like to think? Could it be that the global spread of democracy signals not the liberation of the masses but the liberation of elites from the electorate?

Ivan Krastev: Russia haunts the western imagination