The Duma is the only chamber of the national legislature
that is directly elected. Since the last election in 2007, the United Russia
party headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has held 315 of the 450 seats,
while opposition parties were squeezed out.
The three other parties — the Communists, the nationalist
Liberal Democratic Party and the populist Just Russia — generally offer little
opposition and support the Kremlin in most initiatives.
Another group expected to take part in the December vote is
Right Cause, a Kremlin-friendly party headed by Russian tycoon and New Jersey
Nets basketball team owner Mikhail Prokhorov.
Right Cause is widely seen as a Kremlin creation designed to
lure opposition-minded, pro-business voters, while building an illusion of
competition with Putin’s United Russia.
Medvedev made the announcement during a meeting with leaders
of political parties with a presence in the Duma at his summer residence in
Sochi.
“I would very much want the makeup of our future Duma to
maximally reflect the political preferences of the widest range of our
citizens,” Medvedev said in televised remarks.
The election is to be followed by the presidential vote in
March — with speculation rampant about whether Medvedev will run for a second
term or cede his seat to his mentor Vladimir Putin, who won two elections in
2000 and 2008 and was constitutionally barred from running for a third
consecutive term.
Under a 2005 election law, all seats in the Duma are chosen
by proportional representation, and a party must get at least 7 percent of the
national vote to qualify for seats. During the 2007 vote, opposition, human
rights and vote-monitoring groups claimed the Kremlin orchestrated widespread
machinations aimed at ensuring a high turnout and a big United Russia win.
Medvedev acknowledged the claims in his address.
“Two things are equally unacceptable to us — the
administrative lawlessness of officials who are trying to manipulate the
elections ... and ungrounded claims of falsifications that we often hear from
those who lost,” he said.
Before the 2007 vote, half the Duma’s seats were filled by
candidates from individual races, rather than party lists, allowing
independents and members of small parties a hypothetical chance.
Only officially registered parties are eligible for votes,
and official scrutiny serves as an effective tool to deny registration to
Kremlin critics and liberal parties.
One of them was the People’s Freedom Party, known by its
Russian acronym as Parnas and founded by three prominent opposition leaders. In
June, the Justice Ministry said the party could not be registered because the
ministry had found violations in the required 45,000 signatures the party had
submitted with its application.
One of the party’s leaders, former Prime Minister Mikhail
Kasyanov, said some people who joined had been summoned by police or security
officers who asked why they had joined the opposition party and whether they
understood they could lose their jobs or their children would lose the
opportunity to study at university.
Meanwhile, a handful of leftist and liberal activists
rallied in front of the Central Election Commission in central Moscow to
protest the Kremlin policies of excluding their parties from political life.
Three of them, including head of the opposition Left Front
group Sergei Udaltsov, have been detained by police.
