December 09, 2007	Sunday	Ziqa'ad 28, 1428

MOSCOW: Supporters of two presidential hopefuls from Russia’s fragmentary opposition tried to kick-start their campaigns on Saturday as protests continued over last weekend’s parliamentary elections.

Backers of a quixotic bid by the Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky met to lay plans for a Dec 16 gathering, to which they hope to attract the 500 people required for him to be nominated under Russian election law, campaign manager Nikolai Khramov said.

Bukovsky won international acclaim for campaigning against the Soviet authorities before the Union’s 1991 collapse and for spending over a decade confined in jails and psychiatric hospitals as punishment for his efforts.

But as a British resident, commentators say he has little chance of being registered as a candidate under Russian law, while he has in any case faded from the public eye.

Separately, Mikhail Kasyanov, an ex-prime minister from President Vladimir Putin’s first term, was officially nominated as the candidate of his Russian People’s Democratic Union by a vote of nearly 700 supporters, Russian news agencies reported.

“Either we go down the road of building a civilised state or we continue to slide into the abyss into which we’re being led by the current authorities,” Kasyanov was quoted by Interfax as saying.

The two nascent campaigns came just under three months ahead of the March 2 presidential election, which analysts expect to be a landslide for whomever Putin names as his favoured successor.

Russian electoral law, which has been criticised by Western observers, requires that potential candidates who are not from a party that has seats in parliament must first form an “initiative group” of 500 members before handing their name to the election commission.

Later in the process they must present two million signatures of support for examination by electoral officials.

So far neither Putin nor his United Russia party have said whom they want to put forward for the closely watched presidential race.

On Saturday some 250 Communist Party supporters held the latest in a series of street protests over the results of the Dec 2 parliamentary elections, Echo of Moscow radio reported.

The Communist Party was the only opposition party to win seats at last weekend’s elections but says that the results were falsified by the authorities.

Supporters of the party, which has yet to decide on its presidential candidate, brandished placards saying, “Send the falsifiers to the prison benches,” and “No parliamentary seats for these card sharpers!”—AFP