By the time Gordon Brown, Britain’s former Labor prime minister, arrived at the school in Nottingham where he was scheduled to speak, he was an hour late and the audience had dwindled to 130 people. Brown’s message was “Don’t lose hope.” He said Nelson Mandela once told him of a painting called Hope that he had kept on the wall of his prison cell in South Africa. It showed a girl wearing a blindfold, sitting on a globe trying to play a harp with all its strings broken. “[Mandela] was saying, even in a situation that seems hopeless, there is always hope,” Brown told his audience. “The Labor movement was built on hope.”

Yet hope is much needed by both the main parties in the upcoming UK elections. Brown’s speech left the party faithful somewhat bemused because Labor expected to keep its parliamentary seats in Nottingham, the historic city in England’s East Midlands. It was in Brown’s native Scotland that his party faced its greatest danger. Opinion polls showed the Scottish National Party, the SNP, taking all but four of the 41 seats in Labor’s traditional stronghold—including the constituency Brown himself had represented at Westminster from the early 1980s until his retirement last year. 

The loss would cancel out the slight gains Labor was expected to make against Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives, leading pollsters to predict that the two main political parties would end up close to neck-and-neck. Furthermore, projections showed the Liberal Democrats losing up to half their current parliamentary strength, thus making a resumption of the current coalition with the Conservatives numerically impossible. 

All of which explains why the May 7th election is enveloped in a fog of unpredictability like no other in recent British political history. The era in which “95 percent of the electorate votes for the two main parties, and 80 percent of the country turns out to vote” is long gone, says Joe Twyman, head of political and social research at the polling group YouGov, “but over the last parliament the change has been most pronounced.” 

And Philip Cowley, professor of politics at the University of Nottingham, describes the coming election as “the first in living memory where we expect the outcome to be as messy as it might be,” with the distinct possibility that “a combination of the first- and third-placed parties will not be able to form a coalition.”

Cowley’s point is that with contending candidates from eight parties—Conservatives, Labor, Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the SNP, the Greens, the Welsh party Plaid Cymru, and the Northern Ireland party Democratic Unionist—plus some fringe groups such as the anti-feminist Men and Boys Party, which pushes male rights, a fragmented result was inevitable, and a one-party absolute majority remained virtually out of the question. 

It’s a scenario in which the SNP, having lost the September referendum for Scottish independence, could become pivotal to what happens at Westminster. The party’s popularity has zoomed since the defeat, and pollsters predict that it could siphon off a combined 46 seats from Labor and the Liberal Democrats in Scotland to become indispensable to any coalition.

Some argue that the opinion polls don’t take into account the silent majority—the one that, for example, upset confident predictions that Scotland would choose independence. Also, says Richard Rose, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland, the polls are “meaningless” in a close-run election because “seats in the House of Commons are awarded at the constituency level, not the national level.” It’s also worth remembering that Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system is stacked against smaller parties, and that the number of seats a party wins doesn’t reflect the global total of the votes it receives.

The elephants in the room this year are Nigel Farage’s UKIP on the right, and the Greens. UKIP has emerged as a national political force threatening both the Conservatives and Labor with its xenophobe campaign against immigrants from the rest of Europe and its opposition to British membership of the European Union as the mainspring of its support. In November 2014, UKIP shook the Conservatives by gaining a second House of Commons seat formerly held by a Tory. This one was in the cathedral town of Rochester. Cameron had made retaining it a personal challenge and campaigned there five times. Even so, there is some question how many seats UKIP could gain in the election, given the electoral system’s bias against small parties.

The phrase “hung parliament” is increasingly heard in political discussions, referring to a situation in which neither side wins an overall majority and whoever ends up trying to form a government has to rely on a formal or informal agreement of support from another party to govern. Depending on the circumstances, the ensuing negotiations could be lengthy and constitutionally challenging because, as Catherine Haddon, a fellow of the Institute for Government in London, told the Financial Times, “Most of the time it will be clear which party has lost the election even if it is not clear which has won.” Which is why one scholar suggests that a multi-party system calls for a redefinition of winning and losing. In the old system, “winning used to mean that you thumped the opposition,” she says. “But now the largest party may not be the one to provide the prime minister.”

None of which stopped the experts from focusing on possible combinations of seats that would produce a majority government after election day. According to the Guardian newspaper, a coalition consisting of Ed Miliband’s Labor and the SNP would have 322 seats—close, but still needing the support of a third party, possibly what will be left of the shrinking Liberal Democrats or the rising Greens. 

A political alliance of Cameron’s Conservatives, the SNP, and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats would have 347 seats, and therefore a secure parliamentary base. But Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP’s post-referendum leader, has ruled out a coalition with the Conservatives, while at the same time leaving the way open for a possible pairing with Labor.

There could be reservations on the Labor side, though, particularly because the SNP has raised questions about Britain’s nuclear policy. The Scottish party is unilateralist and opposed to nuclear weapons: Would the Labor Party risk alienating Britain’s relations with the United States and its other Western allies by agreeing to a change in the country’s nuclear defense policy as a price for the SNP’s political support? 

When Cameron was asked if he might negotiate with UKIP to form a government, he snapped indignantly, “We are the Conservative Party, we don’t do pacts and deals. We’ll be fighting all out for a win in the next election.” Given that he had already been forced to negotiate with his current coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, in 2010, the comment was little more than an outburst of frustration at the new and, to many, unwelcome reality in British politics that Farage’s party represents.

For years, politicians in the UK viewed with condescension the complex and often lengthy horse-trading between multiple parties that went into forming a government after elections in countries like Italy and Denmark. In the latter, no single party has won a parliament majority since 1919. But now, despite his bluster, Cameron is likely to have to jump through the same hoops if he wants to remain in power, and no one appreciates the irony more than the Europeans. “The increase in the number of parties [in England] reflects current changes in a society that is becoming more complex (in other words, more European) and finds it hard to identify with the rigid mechanisms of the past,” wrote political commentator Antonio Armellini in the Italian newspaper
Corriere della Sera. But the British are averse to change, he goes on to say, and it is too early to say whether, and in what way, the political system will change to adapt to these new priorities. 

Party leaders in Britain have seen the writing on the wall and know that political alliances loom in their future. But first, there is a campaign to wage. 

Cameron has a good narrative to sell on the economy, given Britain’s continuing recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. The debt is under control. Growth at 2.5 percent is the highest in Europe (and as high as in the United States), unemployment has fallen, and so has inflation. But while his coalition’s management of the economy is a strong campaign theme, it’s also a mixed message because Cameron warns of more austerity ahead, usually coded as “sound fiscal practice,” as in: “Your jobs, homes, the schools your children go to, the hospital you go to when you’re ill, the streets we live in, the very stuff that makes life worthwhile in our country, all things depend on sound public finances. If we fail to meet the national challenge, the writing is on the wall: more borrowing—and all the extra debt interest that brings.”

Labor focuses on improving the health-care service, which has suffered as a result of government spending cuts, and on education. When it comes to universities, Labor will not only cut university fees—Miliband has promised to reduce them from 9,000 pounds a year ($13,500) to 6,000 pounds ($9,000) but also increase support grants given to college students. 

Overshadowing these domestic concerns is Britain’s future in the European Union. Cameron has made a commitment to hold a national referendum in 2017 if he wins the election and has left little space for discussion. Observers say that Euroskepticism has grown among the Tories, and the referendum result is likely to be a very close call, not to mention a destabilizing factor in the EU. 

If Miliband is the next prime minister, he has said there would be no referendum because Britain’s exit from the European Union would be “a disaster.” As Peter Mandelson, a key figure in Tony Blair’s government and now a member of the House of Lords, put it, “Europe is too important an issue to be left to the mercy of the electorate.” But even Labor has its Euroskeptics, although in a minority, and they are disappointed with Miliband’s decision. 

In a year when Britain is marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill, the scores of events, including a service in the Houses of Parliament, are making the electorate aware that the two main political parties have leaders who can hardly be said to have the same heroic stature. Ed Miliband has had his detractors inside Labor since having defeated his more popular brother, David, for the party leadership. According to a recent poll, 44 percent of party supporters think he would make a bad prime minister. He has been called disorganized, distant, and is said to have difficulty getting along with people. 

David Cameron has engendered only tepid approval. His greatest challenge is that he has Boris Johnson, the popular mayor of London, snapping at his heels now that Johnson is standing for election in a so-called “safe seat” the Conservatives have held for the past 17 years. Many Tories regard Johnson as potentially more effective than Cameron—including Johnson himself—and the party is notoriously unsentimental when it comes to dealing with its leadership. 

The 2015 campaign is being described as the most “Americanized” ever because to reach younger voters and win their support the parties have copied Barack Obama’s extensive use of social media in his two successful presidential campaigns. Just as they were in the US presidential elections, Twitter and Facebook have become the favorite area for trading insults and doing other mischief. 

When Cameron tweeted a very serious-looking photo of himself holding a telephone in what Downing Street said was a conversation with President Obama about Russia and Ukraine, it was immediately parodied by several celebrities, including the actor Patrick Stewart, who was shown holding a box of sanitary wipes to his ear instead of a phone. In another image, a woman appeared to be talking into a banana.

In January, Conservatives tweeted a doctored photo of Miliband with Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader who led the failed Scottish independence bid, and Gerry Adams, the leader of the Irish party Sinn Fein, who was once said to have links to Irish terrorists, with the caption “Your worst nightmare just got even worse.” Labor’s retort was, “This is another example of how the Tories intend to fight this election in the gutter.” 

Labor brands the Conservatives as out of touch with the voters and responsible for the growing income inequality, calling them “posh”—a reference to the fact that both the prime minister and his financial minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, went to Eton. Taking a page out of the Obama playbook, Labor depicts itself as “caring,” although the Tories have tried to make competence the hallmark of the election by questioning Miliband’s fitness to lead. Liam Fox, a former chairman of the Conservative Party, said in Washington recently that Miliband was “uniquely unqualified to lead the country in a way I’ve never known in my 23 years in Parliament.” 

Miliband’s wife, Justine Thornton, a lawyer, predicts that the war in the social media will get worse as polling day nears. “I think over the next couple of months it’s going to get really vicious, really personal,” she said in an interview.

But probably not as vicious as it is likely to be for one or both leaders after the election. On the Monday following the May 7th polling, the 1922 Committee, the influential group of Tory back-benchers, is scheduled to hold its election postmortem, and it will be a day of reckoning for Cameron. If he failed to secure a commanding lead over Labor, his position as party leader would be in grave peril. The 1922 Committee has already privately signaled that another coalition with the Liberal Democrats would be unacceptable, even if it resulted in a governing majority numerically, seemingly leaving Cameron with two options—a clear victory or a minority government. In the case of a defeat for Miliband, the conventional wisdom is that the Labor Party is not likely to be very forgiving either. In either situation, the appointment of a new party leader is likely to be a priority over the process of creating a government out of an indecisive result. It could be a long summer for the Brits.

Probably the most serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War, and the White House targets individuals? It seemed an odd response to some observers. But it made sense. At last, after 14 years of dealing with Putin as a legitimate head of state, the US government has finally acknowledged that he has built a system based on massive predation on a level not seen in Russia since the czars. Transparency International estimates the annual cost of bribery in Russia at $300 billion, roughly equal to the entire gross domestic product of Denmark, or many times higher than the Russian budgetary allocations for health and education. Capital flight totaled $335 billion from 2005 to 2013, or about 5 percent of GDP. But then in 2014, with the ruble and oil prices tumbling, it reached more than $150 billion—a figure that has swollen Western bank coffers but made Russia the most unequal of all economies, in which, according to Credit Suisse, 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the country’s wealth.

And these billionaires, far from being titans of industry motoring the modernization of the Russian economy or independent centers of power pushing for reform, have secured and increased their wealth by relying on and bolstering the centralized power of the state. The wealth of the oligarchs and political elites who came to power with Putin in 2000 has been more stable than in any other Group of 7 country. Political leaders close to Putin have become multimillionaires, and the oligarchs around them, according to Forbes, have become billionaires who understand that their wealth and power will be secure as long as they don’t challenge Putin politically. Under this return to state capitalism, the state nationalizes the risk but privatizes the rewards to those closest to the president in return for their loyalty.

Within weeks of Putin’s coming to power in 2000, the Kremlin began to erode the basic individual freedoms guaranteed under the 1993 Russian Constitution. Beginning immediately to deny citizens the rights of free press, assembly, and speech, Putin was assisted by very favorable global economic conditions that muted dissent over what was happening. Indeed, as the price of oil shot up to more than $140 a barrel, the Kremlin was initially able to provide an increased standard of living for ordinary Russians and the emerging middle class while also creating greater social stability. 

But in addition to an assist from favorable economic conditions, Putin also benefited from the existence of a tight-knit circle that came with him from St. Petersburg and with whom he had worked for more than a decade. Working together, they sought to establish a regime that would control privatization, restrict democracy, and return Russia to great power (if not quite superpower) status. Many in this circle used public positions for personal gain even before Putin became president in 2000. The trail leads to the establishment of Bank Rossiya, now sanctioned by the United States; the rise of the Ozero Dacha Consumer Cooperative, founded by Putin and others now subject to visa bans and asset seizures; the links between Putin and Petromed, the oil company that diverted millions in state funds to build “Putin’s Palace” near Sochi; and the role in big business of security officials from Putin’s KGB days in Leningrad and Dresden.

Elections in all new democracies suffer from problems of weak party stability, loose and fluid electoral laws, and voter manipulation and fraud. In theory and practice, these problems should decrease over time, leading to the consolidation of democratic institutions. In Russia, however, they have only increased, until in the 2011–12 electoral cycle the fraud and abuse were considered so widespread that popular demonstrations broke out. By the end of 2011, having come through a thoroughly fraudulent and publicly documented sham election for the Duma (the lower house of Russia’s Parliament), it became clear that the ability of opposition activists to seek democratic change was significantly inferior to the regime’s willingness to suppress them.

After Putin publicly wept, possibly from relief, when he was declared the winner of the 2012 presidential elections, targeted repressions began again, reminiscent of the early 1930s or the late 1960s in the USSR. Nonviolent demonstrators were once again sentenced to either prison or indefinite psychiatric treatment. With the economy suffering a downturn—mainly because of elite plundering—the crony regime’s inner logic was revealed: Putin would use force to maintain his potentially indefinite hold on power so that his group could continue to loot the country under the guise of “restoring Russian greatness,” while the opposition was able only to hold endless Internet discussions about the bespredel—the limitless and total lack of accountability of the elites.

It is this kleptocratic tribute system underlying Russia’s authoritarian regime that the US government sought to expose and punish beginning in March 2014. For the first time, the White House explicitly referred to Putin’s “cronies” and targeted their money abroad, exposing the fact that Western governments have known for some time the broad details of where this group’s money is, what their private rules are, and what high crimes and misdemeanors they have committed to establish and maintain their sistema.

Because this system is complex and clever, full of interesting details and inner rules despite its opacity, we should conclude that it came about by intelligent design rather than by chance. Putin is not an “accidental autocrat” or a “good czar surrounded by bad boyars.” Of course, the boyars—now called oligarchs—are mainly bad. And of course, not every detail of their ascent was planned; certainly they met with deep resistance from other rivals, in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. And Putin’s group could never have predicted how successful they would be and how little their acquisition of power would be resisted by Russians and the West. But what is clear is that the group around Putin today is the same as the one that brought him to power from St. Petersburg in the 1990s and that rather than getting lost on the path to democracy, they never took that path in the first place.

Why did the West not firmly resist “Putin’s project” until now? Many Western officials stationed in Russia certainly knew from the early 1990s what kind of operative Putin was and whom he depended upon to get things done. But he was regarded as a relatively low-level person in one city in one very turbulent country. And so the eyes of Western intelligence were wide shut until, after less than two years, Putin rose from being an out-of-work deputy mayor, whose boss had just lost his bid for re-election, to the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the modern-day KGB. One year later, in 1999, Putin was prime minister; six months after that, he was president. Jobless to president in three and a half years. Only then did Western journalists and policymakers focus closely on his background and the composition of his circle, but by then it was too late. According to government leaks at the time to Newsweek, US government analysis of Putin’s personal involvement in a money-laundering scheme through a German-based company, SPAG, led in 2000 to Russia’s being placed on an international money-laundering blacklist: “A key reason, said a former top US official, was a sheaf of intelligence reports linking Putin to SPAG,” including documents showing he “signed important St. Petersburg city documents for the company’s benefit.” The pattern of helping his friends to the detriment of his people was set early.

The facts of Putin’s rise might have become part of the West’s critique of his governance, but then, at the Slovenia summit in June 2001, President George W. Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul, and Putin quickly joined the “war on terror.” Putin was transformed into a reliable partner in helping the West target Islamic extremists, especially in Afghanistan, since there were Chechen fighters in al-Qaeda camps. Only slowly did Putin’s malevolence dawn on Western governments, especially in light of the Kremlin’s transparently predatory actions in taking apart Russia’s largest private oil company, Yukos, and imprisoning its independently minded owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in 2005. 

The following year, at the Group of 8 meeting in St. Petersburg, Bush called for “strengthened international efforts to deny kleptocrats access to our financial system,” but he still did not mention Russia by name. The New York Times subsequently reported that in 2007 a CIA assessment of Putin’s personal wealth “largely tracked” with assertions made by the Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, who claimed that Putin had holdings totaling about $40 billion in the commodity-trading company Gunvor, the publicly traded state-majority-owned gas giant Gazprom, and the oil and gas company Surgutneftegaz. At last, it seemed that the West might start to stand up against this vast scheme, with its potential to undermine not only Russia’s development but Western financial institutions, the banks, equity markets, real estate markets, and insurance companies that were showing signs of being subverted internally by employees eager to receive a cut of the Putin circle’s illicit transactions.

But then President Obama decided to push the “reset” button in US relations with Russia. As a result, Putin spent only minutes in the penalty box for the 2008 invasion of Georgia before being embraced at the 2009 G8 meeting of the world’s leading industrial nations. The meeting was hosted in Italy by Putin’s personal friend, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whom US government cables—through WikiLeaks—alleged to be “profiting personally and handsomely” from secret deals with Putin that included the “exchange of lavish gifts.” From 2008 to 2014, six more years were lost while low-level government officials in the West gathered materials on Putin’s wealth and high-level political appointees ignored them.

Clearly, in the 1990s democracy was in fact both being built and failing, but the more critical narrative was that there were elites (centered on Putin and his security cabal, the so-called siloviki)who sought from the beginning to establish an authoritarian regime in Russia and to kill the democracy others were trying to build, because it would inevitably force them to someday surrender power. 

When these shadowy figures came to see themselves as the personal guardians and guarantors of Russia’s future, this only increased the possibility that they would not only resist the rotation of elites, critical to a democracy, but actively seek to stymie it. And they used many methods to achieve this, including engaging in criminal behavior, controlling the legal system and the media, and, above all, maintaining group cohesion through combinations of threats and rewards.

Putin and his circle could have passed and upheld laws to protect, promote, cement, and sustain democratic institutions, but they chose not to. On the contrary, they have established what they themselves internally call a sistema that undermines, mocks, and mimics democracy but that actually serves the purpose of creating a unified and stable authoritarian state that allows individuals close to Putin and his associates to benefit personally from the unparalleled despoliation of Russia’s vast natural resources. To be sure, Putin has built a legalistic system, but its net effect is to control, channel, and coerce the middle class and the broader elite while at the same time allowing the inner core to act in accord with what has been called Putin’s “vertical of impunity,” according to the adage “For my friends, anything. For my enemies, the law!”

This is not to say that the Russian ruling elite does not see the benefits of a robust rule-of-law system. That they do is shown by their eagerness to park their money in Western banks. The situation calls to mind American economist Mancur Olson’s idea that in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, “roving bandits” will over time gain an interest in laws to vouchsafe their gains and will settle down, and from their self-interest in the stability and predictability of the system they control, democracy will emerge. Under Putin, as the regime has made the transition from “roving” to “stationary” bandits, inter-elite violence has decreased, and the streets have become safer, as Olson predicted. What Olson failed to foresee was the extent to which globalization would allow Russian elites to continue to maximize their gains by keeping domestic markets open for their predation while minimizing their own personal risk by depositing profits in secure offshore accounts.

The story starts with the collapse of the USSR, when, as the archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reveal, the KGB moved the party’s vast financial reserves offshore, out from under President Mikhail Gorbachev’s control, thus further crippling his regime. The August 1991 coup by Communist and KGB hard-liners failed, but their aspirations remained. One of the chief strategists of Putin’s 2000 victory, Gleb Pavlovsky, subsequently put it like this, after he had been sacked by the Kremlin: “Putin belongs to a very extensive but politically invisible layer of people who after the end of the 1980s were looking for a ‘revanche’ [seeking the return of lost glory] in connection with the fall of the Soviet Union.” The 1990s was devoted to preparing for that moment.

Putin’s early life was spent yearning to join the KGB and finally being accepted. By his own account, his favorite songs are Soviet standards, not Western rock. He has been deeply conservative his whole life. Yet he has also been a keen collector of every possible trapping of material wealth. When he was stationed in East Germany, he had the leaders of the German Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group) steal stereo speaker systems for him when they had a moment free from their terror campaigns. Back in Russia in the early 1990s, Putin acquired a substantial country house, or dacha, and an apartment in a prestigious section of St. Petersburg within his first years of working in the city; neither of these could have been purchased with his meager official salary.

This pattern of uncontrollable greed, of wanting what rightfully belongs to others, which the journalist Masha Gessen calls “pleonexia,” has resulted in 20 official residences, 58 planes, and four yachts. Putin does not “own” any of these, except his St. Petersburg properties and perhaps his first yacht, Olympia, which was presented to him as a gift by a group of oligarchs headed by Roman Abramovich just prior to his becoming president in 2000, and delivered in 2002. Without the presidency, Putin theoretically would not be allowed to keep any of these accoutrements of power, except perhaps for the $700,000 in watches that he routinely sports—six times his declared annual income, a subject of constant Russian journalistic interest. Thus his motivation to leave power is reduced to zero. Those who say politicians can’t be called corrupt unless the police find $20,000 in small bills in their freezer, or who say, “But the US presidents have Camp David,” should contemplate how much has been taken from public funds to finance the construction, maintenance, furnishing, and round-the-clock staffing of these 20 residences, most of which did not exist, or at least not in their current gilded state, prior to Putin’s rule.

The demands of this tribute system have meant that the cost of doing business in Russia has escalated to such an extent that Russian and foreign businesses alike wonder whether they can even turn a profit. The global Swedish furniture chain Ikea threatened to call it quits after years of trying to run a clean business in Russia. When the head of Ikea in Russia, Lennart Dahlgren, left the company in 2006, he revealed that the company had been subjected to years of legal traps that it sought to solve by meeting personally with Putin. But a high-ranking official told them that a meeting with Putin would cost $5 million to $10 million. Not knowing whether the officials were serious or joking, Dahlgren told reporters, “I sensed that it would be better not to get into that discussion any deeper.”

A 2010 cable from America’s ambassador in Moscow, John Beyrle, to the US secretary of state, released through WikiLeaks, provided the following description of how money, elections, criminal activity, and the Kremlin interact:

Vladimir Putin is both a product and a producer of this pervasive system of corruption. Of course, he is not the only Eurasian or Western leader to have collected gifts and tributes. But to have created, with this clique, an entire system that spans 11 time zones is by any measure an impressive achievement and one that the West should take into account as it ponders how to respond to the Russian leader.