The Kremlin front-runner in Russia`s presidential election, Dmitry Medvedev, has the backing of 82 percent of voters with six weeks left before the vote, an opinion poll published on Wednesday showed.

Medvedev, Russia`s first deputy prime minister who was named last month by Putin as his favored successor, has seen his popularity rise 3 percentage points since December, according to the poll by independent pollsters, Levada.

The figures shows Medvedev even further ahead than a separate VTsIOM poll published a day earlier, which gave Medvedev 60 percent support.

The Levada poll put Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov in second place with 9 percent support, unchanged on its December poll. Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky was in third spot with 8 percent, down one.

Unlike the VTsIOM poll, Levada excluded voters who did not know how they will vote, which may have accounted in part for the stronger Medvedev showing.

The poll was carried out on January 18-21, and questioned 1,600 people, with an estimated 3 percent margin of error.

Opposition candidate Mikhail Kasyanov, saw his support fall from 2 to 1 percent. Prosecutors are investigating him on suspicion of forging some of the 2 million signatures he needs to stand in the presidential poll. He says the investigation is political.

The final candidate, Andrey Bogdanov of the Democratic Party, now has 1 percent of voters, the poll found, up from below 1 percent in December.
sections: Society