MOSCOW: A top critic of President Vladimir Putin on Sunday faced a Kremlin-backed incumbent in a hotly contested Moscow mayoral poll, the first time an opposition leader has been allowed to stand in a high-profile election.

In the Russian capital’s first mayoral election in a decade, Muscovites had six candidates to choose from, including current pro-Kremlin mayor Sergei Sobyanin and main opposition candidate Alexei Navalny.

Putin, who has made no secret of his support for his former Kremlin chief of staff Sobyanin, said Moscow did not need a politician for a mayor.

“Such big cities do not so much need to be run by politicians,” he said after casting his vote in Moscow, adding the city should be managed by “depoliticized people, technocrats.”

The candidacy of anti-corruption crusader and protest leader Navalny has made the race the first genuinely competitive Russian election since the heady early post-Soviet years.

The vote will be seen as a crucial test of the protest mood in a city which was shaken by huge demonstrations against Putin’s decade-long rule in the winter of 2011-2012.

Moscow gave Putin a relatively low 46.95 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential election, well below the nationwide average.

Opinion polls have indicated Kremlin-backed Sobyanin, 55, will win a majority in the first round, while Navalny is set to come second with around 20 percent.

Turnout stood at 18.5 percent as of 1100 GMT, the Moscow election commission chief said, a relatively slack figure that officials hoped would improve.

Navalny, 37, made a last-minute plea to supporters by e-mail, urging them to find three acquaintances to turn out and vote to force a second round. “It is on a knife-edge,” he wrote, citing exit polls which he said would be illegal to publish at this stage.

He has threatened protests if officials rig the vote.

Support for the four other candidates in the poll has not been significant.

The Moscow election was part of a nationwide day of local polls across the country, with Kremlin-backed establishment figures also being challenged in key cities like the main Urals center of Yekaterinburg.

Navalny, who shot to prominence during the anti-Putin rallies, has earned comparisons to a young Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president, for his exuberant energy, good looks and promise of change.

Many Muscovites said they would vote for Navalny, who channels public anger against the Kremlin, even if some harbor reservations about his tough anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“He embodies the fight against corruption, honesty, protest against the regime,” said Ivan Volkov, 28, after casting his ballot.

“I am not sure he will win but any vote in his favor will hasten the arrival of political change.” The opposition leader expressed hope that the election would be free of violations as he appeared at a polling station with his elegant wife and two children.