What passes for Russia's presidential contest is progressing smartly.
One candidate has been refused a spot on the ballot, while two others, both businessmen, abruptly withdrew this week with as little fanfare -- and clear explanation -- as when they entered the race. Two of the most prominent opposition candidates, Irina Khakamada and Sergei Glazyev, have failed to win the backing of their own parties, which instead chose to let their members support the incumbent, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of Russia's nationalist party, who is not running, acknowledged in a television interview last weekend that the party's candidate was a stalking horse who, in the inconceivable event he was elected, would promptly resign and make Zhirinovsky president.
Glazyev also came under attack last week on the state's two main television networks, which used hidden cameras to capture what they said were scenes of Glazyev's supporters in Saratov and Nizhni Novgorod paying for signatures supporting his nomination. The reports, which Glazyev denounced as slanderous, prompted the chairman of the election commission to call for a criminal investigation.
"They want to carry out elections in a controllable regimen," Glazyev, a leader of the Motherland bloc, who is running without his party's support, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
"They want to manipulate all the candidates and turn the elections into a political spectacle," Glazyev said.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell used a visit to Moscow this week to rebuke Putin for what he said were troubling developments in Russian democracy, including questioning the fairness of elections and candidates' access to state television.
"Key aspects of civil society -- free media and political party development, for example -- have not yet sustained an independent presence," Powell wrote in an article in the newspaper Izvestia.
But the presidential election on March 14 is shaping up as a repeat of last month's parliamentary election, which the party loyal to Putin, United Russia, swept after a campaign criticized by international observers as falling short of democratic standards. With a deadline for submitting at least 2 million signatures having passed Wednesday night, Putin now faces a diminished field of six challengers, two of whom openly support his re-election on March 14.
"I am not an opponent to Mr. Putin so I don't want to interfere with his campaign," Vladimir Bryntsalov, a pharmaceuticals and vodka magnate, said in an interview on Wednesday after abruptly ending a campaign that never really began.
The election commission now has 10 days to verify the signatures of the remaining candidates. Putin's critics, including Khakamada and increasingly Glazyev, said they fear they could still be thrown off the ballot.
Viktor Geraschenko, a former central bank chairman who also represented Motherland, has already been declared ineligible on the technicality that Motherland is a political bloc and not an officially registered party. Geraschenko has appealed that decision to Russia's Supreme Court.
Putin's challengers say that they are facing bureaucratic obstacles and the vast administrative resources of local governments controlled by the president's allies. They are also struggling -- in vain, they say -- to get their views heard on state newscasts dominated by coverage of Putin.
Putin, for his part, has made no overt signs of campaigning. Given his sky-high popularity, most here expect he never will. The latest poll, published on Wednesday, showed Glazyev coming in second place with 4 percent of the vote. Putin was favored by 79 percent.
"Look at what is happening," Ivan Rybkin, another of Putin's remaining challengers, said Wednesday.
"The law guarantees equal rights for candidates, equal rights to present themselves. For now, there is only one candidate," Rybkin said.
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