MOSCOW, Russia — For the past few weeks, Moscow has looked positively democratic.

Campaign posters line the streets and flutter above the roads as the city gears up for municipal elections on Sunday.

Yet underneath the veneer of competition lies a darker reality.

The vote for the Moscow City Duma, or parliament, is the most high-profile test of United Russia — the party that overwhelmingly rules Russia — since the financial crisis hit last year. That has not been lost on the authorities: Parties challenging United Russia’s dominance have complained of an unprecedented degree of pressure and manipulation as the party tries to show an increasingly disgruntled populace that its grip on power remains strong.

“This is the dirtiest election we’ve had,” said Viktor Ilyukhin, a State Duma deputy and active member of the Communist Party. “They’re scared because of the crisis, that people will vote against them and they will lose their power.”

He accused United Russia of preparing to falsify election results by encouraging multiple voting, busing voters to polling sites and using easily manipulated boxes that are brought to the homes of voters who are too ill or old to go to the polling booths. 

“We have gotten information that teachers are asking children to find out who their parents are voting for, and that at workplaces people are being told to vote only for United Russia,” Ilyukhin said.

The Communist Party remains Russia’s most popular opposition party, though on a national level the communists are accused of having an agreement with United Russia in order to maintain a presence in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. A recent poll by VTsIOM, a Russian pollster, found that if Sunday’s elections were presidential elections, the head of the Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, would come in second, taking 5 percent of the vote compared to President Dmitry Medvedev’s 52 percent (Prime Minister Vladimir Putin did not figure among the options).

The Communist Party currently holds four seats in the 35-seat Moscow City Duma, compared to United Russia’s 29 and two belonging to Yabloko, a liberal party. The city body oversees a $40 billion budget.

Ilyukhin estimated that the communists would garner 30 percent support if the election were held in a free and fair manner. “The way it is, we are simply hoping to hold on to the seats that we have,” he said.

United Russia disputes that, as well as all the claims put forward by the communists. “They’ve shown no evidence,” said Viktor Selivyorstev, a candidate from the United Russia party. “Nothing they have said corresponds to reality.”

Selivyorstev said he was confident United Russia would receive a high showing — and fairly — and downplayed the effects of the economic crisis on the electorate.

“During my campaign, I held over 70 meetings with citizens and not once did I hear anything unpleasant,” he said. “We are aware [of the country’s problems] and we understand what we are doing, because we are the party in power.”

One party that will not have a chance to say that anytime soon is Solidarity, the umbrella opposition party that groups the country’s most prominent dissidents, from chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov to former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

The seven people who the group put forward were forbidden from registering their candidacies. “This will not be a real election,” Kasyanov said. “The powers-that-be have not allowed the full independent opposition to take part — not one independent candidate.” Even Yabloko, which at its root is a liberal party, has lessened its criticism of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, he said.

Luzhkov, of course a member of United Russia, said this week that the elections were “a test of Muscovites’ attitudes toward the city’s legislative branch. At the same time, this is a test of the city’s executive branch too.”

Luzhkov, who has been mayor of Moscow since 1992, has come under increasingly public criticism lately, for everything from a corruption scandal at the city’s main market to alleged corruption within the city government to his role in making his wife, a real estate magnate, the richest woman in Russia.

“It is clear that Luzhkov is concerned that the candidates from his United Russia will do poorly in the Oct. 11 City Duma elections, and this may be one explanation why so many opposition candidates were disqualified from running,” Konstantin Sonin wrote in an editorial in The Moscow Times earlier this week. “But in cases of manipulating elections, a falsified “victory” often ends up as a big loss for the chief manipulator.”

Russians themselves don’t believe the vote will be conducted fairly. A recent study by the Levada Center, an independent pollster, found that just 3 percent of those polled believed the vote would be “completely honest.” Twenty-nine percent thought it would go off “with pressure and manipulation.” Just 17 percent thought it would be “a real fight for voters,” while an overwhelming 62 percent said it would be “an imitation of a fight, with seats in the Moscow City Duma to be distributed by the authorities’ decision.”

Ilyukhin, member of a once-totalitarian party that ran the country unopposed for 70 years, agreed. “If we see mass falsifications, we will appeal to world opinion and show everyone that Russia has no democracy. People aren’t given the right to choose, it’s a group of politicians that choose for them.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/russia/091009/russian-politics