MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin kicked his country's hotly anticipated election season into gear on Sunday by setting December 2 as the date for parliamentary polls.
The December vote will be the beginning of an electoral marathon culminating in March 2008 with elections for a new head of state. Putin, in power since 2000, cannot stand again after serving two consecutive terms in the post.
Campaigning for the 450 seats in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, will officially start when Putin's decree on the poll date is published in official daily Rossiskaya Gazeta on Tuesday, editor Timur Kuznetsov told ITAR-TASS.
Putin's overwhelming approval ratings -- 84 percent in August, according to the respected Levada polling centre -- are likely to set the tone for the vote, lending a huge advantage to the current pro-Kremlin party of power, United Russia.
Predicted to join United Russia in the Duma are the self-described "loyal opposition" party A Just Russia, the Communists and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) led by ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
In 2006 the threshold to win representation in parliament was raised from five to seven percent of the votes cast, while the requirement for a minimum turnout was abolished.
Critics said both moves were meant to bar the nearly extinguished anti-Kremlin opposition from gaining seats.
"There isn't a single political party or force that can take part in elections without the Kremlin's blessing, so you can't call that a competition," Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, told AFP.
"Real power is in the Kremlin, in a small circle around the president."
A poll of likely voters last month by the Levada Centre found 59-percent support for United Russia, ahead of 18 percent for the Communists, nine for A Just Russia, and seven for the LDPR.
Pro-Western parties Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces face electoral oblivion, meanwhile, as both are predicted to fall well short of the seven-percent barrier.
The new rules also mean that the few seats currently held by independent MPs will vanish.
More than 107 million voters are registered to elect the Duma's deputies under a proportional system, and a total 10 to 12 parties will contest the elections, according to Vladimir Churov, the head of the Russian electoral commission.
It is "highly likely" that Europe's top elections watchdog, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), will send a mission to monitor the December polls, another Russian elections official said Saturday.
Central elections commission member Igor Borisov charged that OSCE vote monitoring "has been skewed more than once," but said its quiet criticism of a recent poll in Kazakhstan gave him faith it would be "objective" about the vote in Russia.
Sergei Parkhomenko, a commentator for independent Echo of Moscow radio, said that the Kremlin had been rallying support ahead of the elections for months by encouraging "the idea that Russia is surrounded by enemies, by threats."
"That's the real election campaign," he said.
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