Allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin comfortably won a parliamentary election, early results showed on Monday, but low turnout suggested a softening of enthusiasm for the ruling elite 18 months before the next presidential election.
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The Liberal Democrats and Communists were both recording about 15 percent and A Just Russia had 6 percent.
Other parties trailed far behind United Russia.
Opposition parties also had trouble online: This past spring, the Democratic Coalition, an umbrella group that included PARNAS, saw its website hacked and personal data of thousands of opposition voters was revealed online, as The Moscow Times reported.
“The situation is tough and hard but the people still voted for United Russia”, he said on state television.
Russian people support political stability, Vladimir Putin said as he visited the United Russia campaign office.
Most voters do not see any viable alternative to Putin and his allies, and they fear a return to the chaos and instability of the 1990s, the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if his rule ends. “People want to stay away from politics”. The results are likely to change as votes in the west of Russian Federation are counted. At the same time, Moscow and St. Petersburg were among the Russian regions with the lowest turnout, which amounted to nearly 20 percent in the Russian capital and 16.12 percent in St. Petersburg.
On Sunday, Russians elected the officials to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, as well as to dozens of municipal and regional bodies on the first nationwide Single Election Day – previously voting was held in December.
The total voter turnout stood at 39.37 percent two hours before the polling stations closed, Russia’s Central Elections Committee said in a press release.
Many voters are persuaded by the Kremlin narrative, frequently repeated on state TV, of the West using sanctions to try to wreck the economy in revenge for Moscow’s seizure of Crimea, the Ukrainian region it annexed in 2014.
One global observer at the Russian State Duma elections, Javier Hurtado Mira, the president of centre-right political organization, the Democrat Youth Community of Europe, told RT Spanish that the atmosphere at his polling station was “calm”.
The authorities have also resurrected an old voting system viewed as more equitable, which means that half of parliament will be decided by people voting for individuals with the other half drawn from party lists.
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Elections to the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, were held on September 18 in a split system: 225 members of parliament were elected by party tickets, while the other 225 – in one-seat constituencies. The pollster projected that three other parties had made it into Russia’s new State Duma. Voter turnout in Russia’s previous parliamentary elections in 2011 amounted to 60.2 percent.
