Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will be nominated to run in Russia’s March presidential polls Sunday in a ruling party congress that hopes to ride its leader’s coattails into next week’s legislative polls. The United Russia gathering in Moscow is expected to offer plenty of pomp and patriotic fervor but little suspense after Putin in September accepted a well-choreographed proposal to swap jobs with President Dmitry Medvedev.
Russia’s ruling tandem has since been busy rallying support for its party ahead of December 4 elections to the State Duma in which United Russia is expected to lose some of its current dominance while still coming in first. And the focus Sunday will be squarely on Putin — an ex-KGB man who has been Russia’s most popular figure since his 2000-2008 presidency — as United Russia tries to absorb his charisma and associate itself more closely with his name.
“With a candidate like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, we are confident of our victory,” United Russia party secretary Sergei Neverov said on the eve of Sunday’s meeting. The Luzhniki stadium event will be broadcast live across the nation and attended by some 11,000 delegates who besides Medvedev and the top ministers will include famous sports figures and members of Russia’s cultural elite. United Russia will hope to get a boost from the festivities after the publication of two pre-election polls showing the party losing Duma seats for the first time since it stormed the lower house of parliament in 2003.
The independent Levada centre showed United Russia’s support slipping from the 64.3 percent it enjoyed in the 2007 elections to just 53 percent today. This would leave Putin’s party holding 253 of the Duma’s 450 seats — well down on the current 315 figure and below the two-thirds constitutional majority needed for the Kremlin to change Russia’s basic law without outside support.
