MOSCOW - A delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is due to arrive in Russia on Thursday. It will monitor the elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, scheduled for Sunday, December 7.

PACE observers will monitor every aspect of the elections, including the election campaign, the media coverage of the elections, the level of administrative preparations and the addressing of citizens’ complaints.

The members of the PACE delegation are scheduled to meet with Chairman of the State Duma Gennady Seleznyov, Chairman of the Central Election Committee Alexander Veshnyakov and the representatives of the major political parties and blocs.

Some Russian parties will also play the role of independent observers. On Wednesday, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Yabloko and the SPS (Union of Right Forces) signed an agreement “On the coordination of actions to monitor the process of voting and vote counting in the elections to the State Duma”, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper reports.

“The analysis of the election campaign shows that equal opportunities for all participants of the election process have not been ensured, and administrative resources and federal electronic mass media are used by the authorities mainly to the advantage of one party – the United Russia,” it is said in the agreement.

In view of this, the three parties decided to unite their efforts and take joint actions “throughout all of Russia with the aim to prevent large scale vote rigging”. The allies decided to jointly monitor the process of voting and vote counting.

This friendship is something new, the newspaper notes. Yabloko sometimes entered into tactical alliances with the Communist Party and the SPS party, but the SPS and the Communist Party have never been allies.

Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov has said recently: “We cannot have any alliances with the party of Mr. Chubais.” However, this happened on December 2, when rightists and leftists signed a pact on joint actions. “Of course, this is not a political agreement,” said Boris Nadezhdin, who signed the document on behalf of the SPS party. According to him, this is a forced decision, in the face of huge pressure on the SPS and the Communist Party.