Putin coasts to victory in campaign's final week

RUSSIA: There are few people in Russia who wouldn't dare predict the headlines of next Monday's papers.

RUSSIA: There are few people in Russia who wouldn't dare predict the headlines of next Monday's papers.

They will be reporting on the previous day's presidential elections and, while the campaign contains many a queer feature, the poll's outcome is in little doubt.

The oddities include Opposition candidates who actually support the incumbent, others whose own parties refuse to back them, and one challenger who fled to London after disappearing for five days, during which he claims to have been drugged and made the subject of a salacious video intended to compromise him.

None of this weirdness has touched Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. After four years in the Kremlin, he floats above Russia's political morass on an approval rating near 80 per cent, and his supporters have enough parliamentary power to pass any law and even change the constitution.

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Russia's three national television channels are state-controlled, and coverage of Mr Putin is unwaveringly positive.

His war with separatist Chechen rebels, which he vowed to win when campaigning for the 2000 elections, grinds on, but has all but disappeared from TV screens. Dissenting voices are rarely given a hearing in the popular national media.

Instead, Russians see a man who is friends with world leaders, who commands their gratitude and respect as an ally in the US-led war on terror, and who promises to slash poverty and crush corruption in big business.

While alarming Russian liberals and Western governments, a recent legal crackdown on tycoons is a vote-winner among ordinary Russians who lived in poverty and lost life-savings in the economic chaos of the 1990s, when a few "oligarchs" used ruthless savvy and Kremlin contacts to make billions.

Russians are already so used to the idea of Mr Putin's election win that they saw nothing strange or presumptuous in him sacking the government last month so as to create a cabinet for his second term before a vote had even been cast.

Not that his rivals were in any position to capitalise if the public had balked.

Communist-turned-nationalist Mr Sergei Glazyev has lost ground since the Motherland Party that he led said it would support Mr Putin. Liberal candidate Ms Irina Khakamada struggles to shed a reputation as the "oligarchs' friend", and campaigning is tough for a half-Japanese woman hoping to lead a xenophobic, male-dominated society.

The Communist Party is fielding the lightweight Mr Nikolai Kharitonov in an election it cannot win; a former boxer is standing for the far-right liberal democrats, but has professed his backing for Mr Putin; Mr Sergei Mironov, another candidate and speaker in the upper house of parliament, also says Mr Putin is the best man for the job.

Mr Ivan Rybkin pulled out of the election last week, calling it a farce and complaining of "illegal" pressure from the state. He still insists he was lured to Ukraine, drugged and filmed in a "perverted" video which he was shown when he came to his senses by men he would or could not name. His opponents call it all a publicity stunt.

Mr Rybkin says he may now join a group of prominent liberals who support a boycott of the election.

Human rights activist Ms Yelena Bonner, widow of Soviet dissident Mr Andrei Sakharov, says a boycott is the only way to show the world the absurdity of the poll.

"They will cook up the turnout figure later, and that is not important," she said, urging candidates to "leave Vladimir Putin alone with his puppets".

"What is most important is that everyone who consciously ignores this election will boost their self-respect by not taking part in state lies."