Russia to Vote in Regional Polls with Neutered Opposition

Russians will vote Sunday in a regional election expected to yield few surprises, with the country's liberal opposition only able to field a handful of candidates.

Voters in 42 regions will elect governors and lawmakers for regional and city assemblies, and in some cases will cast ballots for both. 

Experts say the vote has already been manipulated by the Kremlin, which has stopped opposition candidates from standing, or if they have managed to stand, has blocked them from access to the media. 

"It's impossible to say that there won't be mass vote rigging, but it won't be ubiquitous because the ballots have already been neutered," said Andrei Buzin of the Golos election monitoring group.

By Thursday, Golos had already received reports of more than 700 suspected cases of electoral fraud from around the country.

"This is the first time there has been so much vote rigging before the elections. 

"They have replaced the real opposition with a second-rate opposition that's easy to control," said Andrei Nechayev, a former economy minister, whose Citizen's Initiative movement failed to register a single candidate.

The elections come as Russians feel the pinch from the ruble's depreciation as oil prices fall and a lengthy economic slump shows little sign of easing -- all of which has done little to reduce the popularity of President Vladimir Putin.

- 'The controllable opposition' -

"The regional authorities feel in danger at every election and this time, seeing the social situation, they have decided to minimize the risks and hence the contest," said political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin from the Moscow-based Merkator think tank.

"They've let the controllable opposition stand -- the Communists, the Liberal Democratic Party (nationalists) -- but not the liberal opposition."

After the mass protests over the rigged parliamentary elections of 2011, the Kremlin sent out a message to halt blatant ballot-box stuffing, but local authorities may still resort to such techniques, Buzin said. 

The only place where RPR-Parnas -- an anti-Kremlin coalition whose leaders include charismatic whistleblower Alexei Navalny and former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov -- has been allowed to run is the Kostroma region, a rural backwater some 350 kilometers (215 miles) northeast of Moscow.

The party has fielded a slate of two candidates in Kostroma, while 11 other liberal opposition candidates are running as independents in other regions.

An eloquent lawyer who has denounced the ruling United Russia party as full of "swindlers and thieves," Navalny has fearlessly exposed the hidden wealth of government officials, most recently the $620,000 (554,000 euro) watch owned by Putin's spokesman.

A key figure in mass opposition protests against Putin, Navalny was not allowed to stand as a candidate because he has twice been given suspended sentences for fraud in trials denounced by him and his supporters as politically-motivated.

- 'Sophisticated political game' -

During the campaign, one of RPR-Parnas' candidates in Kostroma, Ilya Yashin, was  briefly detained and a volunteer was beaten up. And last week, a television channel accused Navalny of holding a secret meeting with a top U.S. official, a charge he roundly denied.

RPR-Parnas is the "only party that is able and ready to challenge the mafioso authorities that are in charge now, in the country and in Kostroma region," Navalny said during a televised debate.

"The most important thing that a responsible voter who believes in Russia can do, is come to the polls and vote against United Russia," he said.

Navalny's coalition had been allowed to stand in the Kostroma region as a concession to the opposition, Oreshkin said. 

"Letting the opposition campaign in Kostroma is a sophisticated political game on the part of the Kremlin, but this remains an experiment that is absolutely under control," he said. 

A survey by state pollster VTsIOM on Monday found that 44 percent of voters in Kostroma planned to vote for United Russia, while one percent planned to vote for RPR-Parnas.

The opposition has already called for a mass protest over the elections on September 20.