Russians To Elect 1 Of 8 Candidates Today In Presidential Race

Today voters in Russia will go to the polls to elect a president for a new six-year term.

Seven of the presidential candidates have been nominated by political parties and one, the incumbent President Vladimir Putin, is standing as an independent.

Putin, at age 65, is running for his fourth term. His third term has been marked by tensions with the West, involvement in a war still ravaging Syria, and accusations that Russia meddled in the American presidential election in 2016.

However Putin is widely seen at home as achieving considerable success: A bloodless acquisition of Crimea and its incorporation into Russia is hailed as a victory. And the Kremlin’s backing of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and his fight against Islamic State militants, with Russian support, is considered another positive for Russian foreign policy. Russians see their country as a power broker in the Middle East and a key to the region’s stability, while having boosted the prestige of their armed forces.

Meanwhile, candidate Putin has had to steer an economy that was hit by Western economic sanctions as a result of Russian action in Ukraine and the viewpoint from Washington that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

But Putin's campaign remains confident.

"We achieved the strengthening of Russia's security, the increase of its defense capability and the boosting of its influence in the world,” reads a statement on his campaign’s website.

The section of the website dedicated to future plans mentions projects such as the creation of a network of centers across Russia for gifted children; increasing doctors’ salaries to 200 percent of the regional average; opening a road bridge between the Russian mainland and Crimea by the end of this year; increasing the proportion of modern weapons in Russia's nuclear triad to 90 percent by 2021; and introducing legislation to regulate cryptocurrencies.

Pavel Grudinin of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) is running under "Grudinin. Justice. Motherland. The People" slogan.

Now age 57, he made a career at the Lenin collective farm agriculture business outside Moscow as an engineer and director. The farm has been described as an "island of socialism", where workers enjoy modern housing as well as other benefits, including free medical treatment and low utility charges.

"We have attempted to retain socialist principles," Grudinin said in a 2016 interview with the website Svobodnaya Pressa.

Grudinin’s political platform is spelled out on Grudininkprf.ru as “Grudinin's 20 Steps,” which is heavily focused on proposals for a transformation of the Russian economy away from "oligarchic capitalism, towards a social state.”

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 71, of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), is running under the slogan "Powerful leap forward." A veteran of Russian politics for nearly 30 years, the LDPR candidate is piggy-backing on the party’s successes in 2016 when it came in third in the State Duma parliamentary election, when it won more than 50 seats.

Zhirinovsky's platform is peppered with slogans and policies such as "Restore Russia's greatness. Return under Russian colors all the lost territories. Peacefully, without war – through referendums.”

Ksenia Sobchak of the Civic Initiative Party is campaigning as the "Candidate ‘Against All’" slogan. The 36 year old is the only female contender. She is the daughter of a former mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, seen by some as Putin's political mentor. Sobchak originally made her name as a socialite and TV personality.

Her life changed abruptly in 2012 after she publicly aligned herself with the protest movement that sprang out of the allegations of vote-rigging at the previous year's State Duma parliamentary election. She rebranded herself as a serious political journalist, hosting shows on the liberal TV station Dozhd.

When Sobchak announced her intention to run for the presidency last October, she initially positioned herself as the protest candidate or the “candidate against all.” Her campaign website states she will undertake “123 difficult steps” if elected, which she says were drawn up with the help of "independent experts" and the Civic Platform party, under whose banner she is running.

Grigory Yavlinsky from the Yabloko Party is running under the banner "Believe in the future. Believe in yourself!” The veteran founder of the liberal social-democratic party Yabloko, the 65 year old economist is running for Russia’s presidency for a third time.

Yavlinsky’s campaign website lists his six priority policy areas: defeating poverty; changing public spending priorities; ending the aggressive confrontation and war with Ukraine; economic growth; normalizing relations with the U.S., the EU and their allies; and restoring health to political and public life within the country. There is also a proposal for a military withdrawal from Syria.

Boris Titov represents the Party of Growth, with "Titov knows" as his campaign slogan. The 57 year old businessman and presidential commissioner for protection of the rights of entrepreneurs is also the head of a union of entrepreneurs Delovaya Rossiya (meaning “Business Russia”).

Titov is running on a heavily pro-business platform, aimed at stimulating economic growth. He believes the benefits of his proposed policies will be the creation of 4,000 new factories across Russia within five years and 10 million well-paid jobs. He is also campaigning on the doubling of salaries, a 150 percent increase in pensions, tripling healthcare funding and quadrupling education spending.

Maxim Suraykin from the Communists of Russia (CoR) party is campaigning under the slogan "Ten Stalinist blows to capitalism," borrowed from the CoR party’s parliamentary election platform that used the same name during the 2016 elections. At age 39 Suraykin leads the CoR, a hard-line communist breakaway movement founded in 2009.

The 10 “blows” are: 1) Nationalization of enterprises in key economic sectors; 2) Restoration of capital punishment, including for large-scale embezzlement; 3) Restoration of Soviet labor laws; 4) Ban on raising the pension age; 5) Utilities bills not to exceed 10 percent of family income; 6) Large raises in the minimum wage and pensions; 7) Free summer holidays for workers' children; 8) Abolition of healthcare reforms; 9) Recreation of a union state based on the borders of the former USSR; 10) Ending of interference of religious organizations in public life.

Sergei Baburin of the Russian All-People's Union is another candidate, running under the headline "Baburin 2018.” He was a moderately prominent politician in the 1990s and the 2000s.