Russia Gears Up for Presidential Vote
Source: Alalam.ir, 1-3-2008
MOSCOW--Russians are gearing up to vote Sunday to elect the country's third president since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The replacement for President Vladimir Putin is widely believed to be his ally Dmitry Medvedev who launched a one-sided campaign.
The first polls were to open at 2000 GMT Saturday, which is early Sunday morning in the Russian Far East region of Kamchatka, some 6,000 km (3,700 miles) east of Moscow.
Opinion polls forecast Medvedev will win at least 60 percent of the national vote, easily clearing the minimum 50-percent barrier to win outright and setting him up to begin a four-year term beginning May 2.
Poll rivals Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky were expected to get around 10 percent each, polls predicted, while outsider Andrei Bogdanov was seen securing around one percent.
A deputy prime minister and long-time Putin ally, Medvedev has said he will offer his mentor the prime minister's job, in a move many see as means of maintaining Putin's power.
Under Putin's eight-year leadership, Russia has revitalized as a promising world power with stable political situations, a prosperous economy and confident citizens other than a country facing social, economic and political collapse at the end of the 1990s.
Putin is widely popular among the people, who now look to the future with greater optimism and confidence than at any time over the past two decades.
Under Putin, real wages have tripled and unemployment has fallen sharply.
As Putin's anointed heir, 42-year-old Medvedev was soon in the spotlight after the incumbent president publicly announced that he supported Medvedev's candidacy at the end of last year.
Medvedev, first deputy prime minister, leads Kremlin initiatives to fix housing, health care, education and agriculture.
As the supervisor of national projects, he is generally seen as a "socially oriented" politician.
If elected as expected, Medvedev will take the reins of a country of 142 million people that Putin has transformed since rising from obscurity in 2000 to replace the ailing and deeply unpopular Boris Yeltsin.
As the world's leading energy exporter, Putin's Russia has used soaring gas and oil revenues to rebuild a collapsed military and to pay off international debts racked up in the post-Soviet 1990s.
New economic confidence is also fuelling a bullish foreign policy that puts Moscow at odds with the US and Western Europe -- a rift antagonized by Western complaints of crackdowns on Russia's opposition.
However, Medvedev's expected election was clouded by increasing criticism of the campaign by international observers and Russia's fragmented opposition.
Top European monitoring body the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) decided to boycott Sunday's poll citing restrictions on its monitors.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which will send 25 representatives, said in a preliminary report that the vote "can hardly be considered as fair."
On Sunday polls open in each of Russia's 11 time zones at 8 am local time with the final polling stations closing on Sunday in Russia's Baltic region of Kaliningrad at 1800 GMT.
In total, around 109 million Russians are eligible to vote
MOSCOW--Russians are gearing up to vote Sunday to elect the country's third president since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The replacement for President Vladimir Putin is widely believed to be his ally Dmitry Medvedev who launched a one-sided campaign.
The first polls were to open at 2000 GMT Saturday, which is early Sunday morning in the Russian Far East region of Kamchatka, some 6,000 km (3,700 miles) east of Moscow.
Opinion polls forecast Medvedev will win at least 60 percent of the national vote, easily clearing the minimum 50-percent barrier to win outright and setting him up to begin a four-year term beginning May 2.
Poll rivals Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky were expected to get around 10 percent each, polls predicted, while outsider Andrei Bogdanov was seen securing around one percent.
A deputy prime minister and long-time Putin ally, Medvedev has said he will offer his mentor the prime minister's job, in a move many see as means of maintaining Putin's power.
Under Putin's eight-year leadership, Russia has revitalized as a promising world power with stable political situations, a prosperous economy and confident citizens other than a country facing social, economic and political collapse at the end of the 1990s.
Putin is widely popular among the people, who now look to the future with greater optimism and confidence than at any time over the past two decades.
Under Putin, real wages have tripled and unemployment has fallen sharply.
As Putin's anointed heir, 42-year-old Medvedev was soon in the spotlight after the incumbent president publicly announced that he supported Medvedev's candidacy at the end of last year.
Medvedev, first deputy prime minister, leads Kremlin initiatives to fix housing, health care, education and agriculture.
As the supervisor of national projects, he is generally seen as a "socially oriented" politician.
If elected as expected, Medvedev will take the reins of a country of 142 million people that Putin has transformed since rising from obscurity in 2000 to replace the ailing and deeply unpopular Boris Yeltsin.
As the world's leading energy exporter, Putin's Russia has used soaring gas and oil revenues to rebuild a collapsed military and to pay off international debts racked up in the post-Soviet 1990s.
New economic confidence is also fuelling a bullish foreign policy that puts Moscow at odds with the US and Western Europe -- a rift antagonized by Western complaints of crackdowns on Russia's opposition.
However, Medvedev's expected election was clouded by increasing criticism of the campaign by international observers and Russia's fragmented opposition.
Top European monitoring body the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) decided to boycott Sunday's poll citing restrictions on its monitors.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which will send 25 representatives, said in a preliminary report that the vote "can hardly be considered as fair."
On Sunday polls open in each of Russia's 11 time zones at 8 am local time with the final polling stations closing on Sunday in Russia's Baltic region of Kaliningrad at 1800 GMT.
In total, around 109 million Russians are eligible to vote
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