Summary Moscow's pro-Kremlin mayor was set to win tight elections Sunday in the Russian capital.
MOSCOW (AFP) - Moscow s pro-Kremlin mayor was set to win tight elections Sunday in the Russian capital, just escaping a second-round run-off after a strong challenge from protest leader Alexei Navalny, who denounced the results as falsified.
Initial results showed that Sergei Sobyanin, a leading ally of President Vladimir Putin, would narrowly win in the first round with just over half the vote after Navalny unexpectedly picked up over a quarter of the ballots.
In a nationwide day of local polls that may worry the Kremlin, opposition anti-drugs campaigner Yevgeny Roizman defeated the pro-Kremlin candidate in elections for Russia s fourth largest city Yekaterinburg.
In Moscow, Sobyanin was winning 51.4 percent of the vote with Navalny on 27.2 percent, the Moscow election commission said in a count based on over 80 percent of polling stations reporting.
But Navalny, 37, insisted he had managed to force the mayor into a second round and threatened street protests if the authorities did not acknowledge Sobyanin had polled less than 50 percent.
"What we are seeing now are clear falsifications," he told reporters in a late night briefing at his campaign headquarters in Moscow.
"We demand that a second round is held. If that is not done... we will appeal to the citizens and ask them to take to the streets of Moscow."
The candidacy of Navalny -- who campaigned under the shadow of a conviction in a controversial embezzlement case -- made the race the first genuinely competitive Russian election since the heady early post-Soviet years.
In a late-night rally in central Moscow attended by thousands and lit up by fireworks, Sobyanin had said he was sure of victory and congratulated himself for organising "the most honest and open elections in the history of Moscow".
"We have something to be proud of," he told the cheering supporters.
But turnout was low at 26.5 percent as of 1400 GMT, an unusually slack figure, which indicated Navalny had been far more successful at bringing out his supporters than the mayor, who ran a supremely low-key campaign.
Communist candidate Ivan Melnikov was third in the partial results with just over 10.6 percent of the vote, while other contenders merely made up the numbers.
