MOSCOW, March 17 (Xinhua) -- Incumbent Russian President Vladimir Putin is a proven national leader and a favorite in the upcoming presidential election, a local political analyst has said.

Putin has created a political system capable of adjusting itself to tackling challenges, said Alexei Mukhin, director general of the Center for Political Information, a think tank based in Russia's capital Moscow, in an recent interview with Xinhua.

"It is very important that this political system provided support to the authorities, allowing them to feel confident both in foreign and domestic policy," Mukhin said.

According to the expert, under Putin, Russia has "returned to the great geopolitical game, in which it is already a player."

Putin has created a two-tier economy consisting of private and public sectors, allowing the country's institutions to withstand the 2008 financial crisis, make up for the losses and resist a series of financial sanctions introduced by the West since 2014, Mukhin said.

Therefore, Putin has no replacement in Russia from the point of view of political weight and influence, which makes him a likely landslide winner in the upcoming presidential election on Sunday, he said.

Eight candidates have registered for the race, with seven from various political parties and Putin, a self-nominated candidate.

Mukhin said the campaign is taking place on several platforms. The first one, on which Putin is active, is a platform where he has his own consolidated electorate not claimed by the rest of the candidates.

Leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and Pavel Grudinin, an entrepreneur supported by the Russian Communist Party, said Mukhin, are on the second platform and are trying to grab electors from each other.

The remaining five candidates, who enjoy very little attention from the voters, share the third platform, Mukhin said.

The analyst does not predict any protests following the election in Russia, since the recent attempts to organize mass protests failed due to the absence of real opposition.

"The presidential administration has done a lot by facilitating the process of registration and creation of parties, as well as liberalizing the electoral legislation. It has created conditions for the emergence of the opposition, but it did not emerge," Mukhin said

However, he said protests may be staged deliberately with external interference from the unfriendly parties aiming to weaken the the new Russian leadership and question the legitimacy of the election results.

Mukhin said Russia is ready to deal with such interference by creating a legislative framework that allows to recognize some non-governmental organizations as foreign agents and undesirable bodies and thereby partially neutralize threats they brought.

The electorates have pinned high hopes on Putin, Mukhin said.

"Putin has outlined a number of problems and tasks that will have to be solved in the event of his victory in the election, first of all, the creation of a person-centered social state that will pay more attention not to the development of the political system, but to creating a comfortable environment for the Russian citizens," he said.

Putin served as president for two terms from 2000 to 2008. Then he was succeeded by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev between 2008 and 2012, when the two reversed their posts again.