Exit polls: Putin will return to presidency in Russia

Exit polls forecast Vladimir Putin to win another term as president of Russia, while his opponents plan to take to the streets this week and beyond.

A third presidential term for Vladimir Putin appears to be done and down. An exit poll by the state-run VTsIOM public opinion center, released after polls closed Sunday night, showed the Russian prime minister winning 58.3 percent of the votes, enough to give him a solid first-round victory and send him back to the Kremlin for six years.

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Another exit poll, by the independent Public Opinion Foundation, found that Putin won with 59.3 percent of the votes.

But the mood in Moscow, where Mr. Putin's popularity is low, was anything but celebratory. Opposition leaders were already crying foul and drawing up plans for rolling protests this week against elections they say were unfair in their very essence. In coming days, reports from tens of thousands of independent election monitors will likely hit the Internet, adding fuel to the protests if significant fraud should be uncovered.

Much of downtown Moscow was blocked off by about 40,000 special riot police, who set up barricades and blocked access to main squares with rows of buses, apparently aiming to forestall any opposition attempt to hold the kind of fast-moving flash-mob protests that erupted just after the allegedly fraud-tainted elections in December.?

Opposition forces will stage a show of strength Monday evening on Moscow's central Pushkin Square, just a five minute walk from the Kremlin, which they expect up to 50,000 people to attend. Some of the more radical leaders, such as anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, argue that it's time to turn the protests from single-event affairs into rolling "Occupy the Kremlin" style tent cities. According to the Moscow Times, Mr. Navalny said Sunday that Putin's re-election can already be judged a fraud, and the popular goal now would be to overturn the result.

"Now it's become obvious that violations that are completely irrefutable are significantly influencing the results of the vote," Navalny said. "Monday everyone should go out on the streets wherever they want," regardless of whether authorities grant permits for the meetings, he said. "We have a right to assemble and it's a citizen's duty to come out and say that we're not happy with what's happened."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/rJjEJ8S2if4/Exit-polls-Putin-will-return-to-presidency-in-Russia

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