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Duma vote to strengthen Putin's hand

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW DEC. 6. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, looks set to tighten his grip on power as a result of parliamentary poll on Sunday, with his loyalists heading for a strong majority in the new State Duma, the Lower House of the Russian Parliament.

A suicide bomb attack on a commuter train near Chechnya on Friday, which claimed 42 lives and injured 220 people, cast a dark shadow on the Sunday vote, but is unlikely to influence its outcome. United Russia party, a brainchild of the Kremlin, is predicted to come out a big winner in the election and sideline the main Opposition Communist Party, which has won all the previous parliamentary polls in post-Soviet Russia on party list vote. Half the 450 seats in the State Duma are allocated by party lists, the other half by single-mandate districts. Out of 23 parties and blocs in the fray, only four to six are likely to clear the 5-percent vote hurdle to get into Parliament.

United Russia, created by the Kremlin just months before the last parliamentary election in 1999, came slightly behind Communists four years ago, capturing more than 23 per cent of the vote and together with allies controlled more than half the seats in the outgoing legislature. This time the pro-Kremlin party is tipped to win twice as many seats as Communists and with some horse-trading might even win a two-thirds majority. This will give Mr. Putin absolute control over the Lower House in the run-up to presidential elections next March.

The most remarkable thing about the United Russia success is that the party has no ideology, apart from declaring unquestioned support for the President, Vladimir Putin. "We're with the President. Vote for us!" is the main election slogan of United Russia, which is led by two senior Cabinet Ministers and has among its members half the regional governors and a generous proportion of federal and local bureaucrats.

It is the President's enormous popularity that carries United Russia to victory. According to a November poll, 78 per cent of Russians trust Mr. Putin and 81 per cent feel positively toward him. Mr. Putin has thrown his support behind United Russia, describing it as the party on which he has relied during his four years in power.

Declining support for the Communist Party would look strange, given a distinct shift to the left in public mood as registered by pollsters, had it not been for the fact that Mr. Putin and United Russia have hijacked the slogans of the Communists, calling for a more fair distribution of the country's natural-resource wealth and a crackdown on runaway corruption. Opinion surveys show that the most popular candidate for President among the Communist Party's electorate is not its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, but Mr. Putin.

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