Russian opposition groups lay ground for presidential bids

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 December 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 told AFP.
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 faded somewhat from the public eye, Bukovsky has called for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight (G8) wealthy countries, accusing Russian authorities of being behind the fatal radiation poisoning last year of Russian ex-agent Alexander Litvinenko.
"We should do everything we can to ensure Bukovsky's nomination is not scrapped," Khramov said on the campaign website on Friday. 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.