Three Russian political groups united on Sunday to form a new liberal party called "The Right Thing" under a plan that party leaders said had been set out by the Kremlin, an AFP photographer said.
Delegates at the party's founding congress in a Moscow hotel voted by a show of hands to approve the formation of the new party, criticised by some other opposition groups as being part of Kremlin moves to manage democracy in Russia. "The country needs this... There is no significant political force on the political scene that represents right-wing ideas," Leonid Gozman, ex-leader of one of the three parties, the Union of Right Forces, told the delegates.
Responding to criticism of plans to set up the new party, Gozman told Echo of Moscow radio station in an interview last week: "It's the reality in this country... These days you can't form a party without the Kremlin."
The Russian political scene is currently dominated by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and there are no liberal opposition politicians in parliament after elections last December.
But Kremlin leaders have repeatedly spoken about the importance of encouraging a multi-party democracy and in a speech this month President Dmitry Medvedev said smaller parties should be more represented in parliament.
The three parties that united on Sunday are Civic Force, Union of Right Forces and the Democratic Party, which together got just 2.14 percent of the vote in recent parliamentary elections.