A rally of pro-Kremlin youth movements headlined "Everything Goes as Planned" is held in Moscow
Photo: Pavel Solovyev
| Other Photos |
 |
|
 |
United Russia Exhausts Its Electoral Resource – Pollsters
The United Russia party will win the upcoming parliamentary election but its electoral resource has almost been exhausted, pollsters at the Levada Center said on Friday. Seats in the next Duma are most likely to be divided between United Russia and the Communist Party, according to the polling agency.
The second week after President Vladimir Putin said he would head United Russia’s party list in the Duma election has not changed preferences of Russians, pollsters say. All polling agencies say United Russia will win and the Communists will come in second. Ratings of other parties are so low that they will hardly pass the 7 percent threshold, pollsters say.
55 percent of those polled by the Levada Center say they will come to vote at the Duma election, which is almost the same as it was two weeks ago. “Putin’s decision to head United Russia’s list did not give make the election more popular,” Levada Center’s director Lev Gudkov explained at a news conference on Friday.
55 percent said in September they would vote for United Russia. President Putin’s announcement in early October raised this figure to 68 percent and 67 percent in mid-October. The growth was achieved by what pollsters call “an electoral marsh” which is people without a firm opinion who were not sure whether they would come to vote and for whom. “United Russia should not hope that its rating will be growing,” Levada Center’s Boris Dubin said. “If one party combines everything – the country’s main man, the majority of voters, media where it dominates, it means that there’re no more resources left.”
Surveys of the VTsIOM polling agency show all other parties including the Communists will fail to muster 7 percent to qualify for the parliament. VTsIOM expects them to gather 6 percent of the vote while the Levada Center preditcs 17 percent. The pollsters would not explain the difference in surveys. The only party that may still hope to qualify for the Duma is the Liberal Democrats with 6 percent in the Levada Center’s polls and 4 percent in VTsIOM’s. “We are dealing with a new kind of election,” Boris Dubin said referring to the virtual absence of alternatives. “We haven’t had this kind of election for the past 20 years.”
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 20, 2007
|
|
|
