The Party of Life, a minor Kremlin-loyal party led by the upper house of parliament's speaker, and Rodina (Motherland), which many observers said was set up in 2003 to take away potential Communist votes, said earlier Tuesday that they would seek to consolidate left-leaning political forces to fight regional and parliamentary elections in the next two years.
"I would generally welcome the attempt by [Federation Council Speaker] Sergei Mironov to create a serious left-of-center party in Russia. But I believe that the steps that they are taking now are aimed in the opposite direction," said Andrei Isayev, a member of the United Russia presidium.
He said the Party of Life was acting "like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up all fringe elements that have fallen by the wayside, including people adhering to nationalist positions."
Mironov himself said the idea was not to create an electoral bloc but a new left-leaning party and criticized United Russia, which has a constitutional majority in the lower chamber of parliament and dominates Russian politics.
"It is a party of political monopoly, over-the-top bureaucracy, a path leading nowhere," he said.
Isayev dismissed the remarks.
"I would like to say that decisions that are taken by United Russia in the State Duma are constantly approved by the Federation Council, which is chaired by Sergei Mironov. Suggesting that he is responsible for all the goods things that happen, while United Russia should take responsibility for all the bad things looks neither very good nor very convincing," Isayev said.
Although Rodina stormed to an unexpected 9% of the vote in 2003 on the back of a populist election campaign headed by then leaders Sergei Glazyev and Dmitry Rogozin that targeted inequality created by the oligarch class, it has since courted controversy with local advertisements that led to accusations of racism.
The Party of Life failed to win the 5% of the vote in 2003 needed to take up seats in the Duma - even though it ran in harness with a bloc led by the then Duma speaker, Gennady Seleznyov - and has had little impact on the political scene.
