In the west of Moscow, the candidate Mikhail Lobanov is wrestling with the power party United Russia, but above all with the apathy of the electorate.

On this late summer evening, they embody two women sitting on a bench, smoking, in the courtyard of three apartment blocks.

Actually, this is a good area of ​​constituency 197, the houses are made of light-colored stone, no prefabricated buildings, a park is right next door.

But the women complain about their narrow apartments, houses that have not been renovated by the city and the almost ten-year-old playground in the courtyard.

A starting point for 37-year-old Lobanow.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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But if the Communist candidate in the constituency tries to turn women into voters, sentences like "Nothing depends on my vote" or "We voted earlier, not anymore" are uttered.

Lobanov, a lecturer at the Mechanical and Mathematical Faculty of Moscow State University, wants to motivate them, reports on his success as a longtime activist, how he defended parks from building contractors and protected the rights of students and teachers.

And Lobanov repeats his mantra again and again: In the elections to the Duma on "unified voting day", September 19, either he or the candidate of United Russia will win.

Record levels of hurdles, exclusions and persecution

The fall in popularity of the power party is the main asset of candidates like Lobanov. It gives Russia's lower house elections, which those in power are trying to pull every tooth through a record level of hurdles, exclusions and persecution, a residual measure of tension. The worst blow for United Russia, which has had a three-quarters majority of the 450 Duma MPs since 2016, was an increase in the retirement age in 2018. It suddenly dropped the party's popularity from around 45 to 35 percent.

Under the impression of stagnation and inflation, it has since fallen to well below 30 percent. This makes United Russia the most popular party - but at the same time the least popular in the polls. Candidates such as Lobanov's main opponent, the state television man Yevgeny Popov, who, with his wife, who also works for state television, incites against state enemies and the Ukraine, respond with malice and questions about their income on the Internet. So the moderator evades a debate with Lobanov.

Five years ago, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) criticized the Duma elections, the repressive environment, the misuse of administrative resources and the irregularities in the counting of votes. At that time, for security reasons, none of the 466 OSCE observers traveled to areas in the North Caucasus, which always report fabulous approval for United Russia. The observers also avoided the annexed Crimea, which was also elected. Hundreds of thousands of residents of the “People's Republics” in Donbass, which Russia has meanwhile also naturalized, are now to vote in the neighboring Rostov region in southwest Russia, in person or online: The region is one of several areas in which Internet voting is being experimented with.Electoral experts see this as one of numerous gateways for counterfeiting.