By Ulf Mauder Oct 10, 2009, 5:08 GMT
Moscow - Even after 17 years as mayor of the largest city in Europe, 73-year-old Yury Luzhkov isn't tiring of holding office.
The politician who has ruled the Russian capital with an iron fist will stand for re-election on Sunday for possibly the last time. In the run-up to the election his critics in the Kremlin and in the opposition already have had to pipe down.
The electoral commission has refused to allow most of Luzhkov's opponents to run for the 35-seat duma, or council, citing invalid signatures on petitions collected from supporters. But the mayor has other cards up his sleeve, too.
As the husband of Russia's richest woman, Yelena Baturina (whose estimated net worth is more than 1 billion dollars) Luzhkov has a huge business empire behind him. Indeed, he is thought to be so well connected that even President Dmitry Medvedev could not undermine him, commentators say.
The mood among voters in the city of more than 10 million people runs from frustration to resignation to approval from people who believe they have a lot to thank Luzhkov for. But there's hardly any sense that an election campaign is under way.
'The fact that the electoral commission removed undesirable candidates shows that the decision of who gets into the duma has already been made,' said Andrei Busin, chairman of the inter-regional voter association, in Moscow magazine The New Times.
'We are worried about our entry,' Sergei Mitrokhin, head of the opposition liberal Yabloko Party, told the German Press Agency dpa. The moderate opposition party has until now held two seats in the Moscow city duma.
The governing party, United Russia - of which Luzhkov is a founding member - however, has nothing to worry about. Election posters in party colours lure voters with slogans about freedom and democracy from US President and founding father Thomas Jefferson.
But critics of the government, such as Boris Nemtsov - a former deputy prime minister of Russia - have complained that the election is taking an undemocratic course. In no civilized country in the world would something like what is happening in Moscow be possible, they say.
Nemtsov claims Baturina has obtained hundreds of hectares of building lots, and controls 20 per cent of the residential market.
Nemtsov accuses Luzhkov of turning Moscow into one of the most expensive cities in the world where quality of life is only affordable to the rich.
Preservationists criticize him for having destroyed cultural and historic buildings to make room for offices and business centres.
According to opinion polls, the pro-government communists and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, have a good chance of reaching the 7 per cent hurdle required for entering the city parliament.
Moscow's annual budget is about 24 billion euros, approximately the same as the budget of Ukraine.
The New Times has estimated that it costs around 4.8 million euros to run for a seat in the city duma. Members of the city parliament, unlike equivalent members of the Russian duma, are considered truly influential politicians with the best contacts to the Russian government. In the murky wold of Russian politics, ministers and Moscow city duma members scratch each other's backs, the magazine claims.
Ilya Yashin, a young politician now accused by the electoral commission of falsifying every one of the signatures he collected to register for the campaign, is demanding an end to favouritism.
Luzhkov has come under criticism on a variety of fronts, not just for ignoring rulings from judicial authorities and orders from the Kremlin. Despite demands from Medvedev for greater democratization, the city has forbidden opposition demonstrations and has sent riot police to break up unsanctioned demonstrations by gays and lesbians.
After Medvedev called for a rigorous fight against corruption throughout the country, the mayor of Moscow's reaction from his office in city hall on Tverskaya Boulevard was lukewarm, to say the least.
'We live in the real world - corruption is also reality,' Luzhkov said. He warned against excessive 'alarmism', saying it hinders the job at hand.
But he also has had to concede on the election trail that the city has not been able to get to grips with one of Moscow's biggest problems - constant traffic gridlock.
A solution? One of his city planners has suggested building an underground city.
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