With just under 48 percent, voter turnout was the lowest in Russia’s modern history and significantly down from the 60 percent registered in 2011.
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Still, the result reinforced the political system engineered by the Kremlin under Putin over the past 16 years.
The Communist Party gained 13.53 percent of the votes, the Liberal Democrats party has 13.28 percent, while A Just Russia won 6.19 percent.
No other party has managed to overcome the five percent threshold necessary to obtain entry into the State Duma on the party ticket, she added. The win gives United Russia a two-thirds majority that allows it to amend the constitution.
The outcome was not surprising.
Although he has not yet announced he is running, the strongman leader now looks set to stroll to victory in presidential elections in 2018.
After the last election, anger at ballot-rigging prompted large protests in Moscow, and the Kremlin will be anxious to avoid a repetition of that.
Around Russia, elections for regional heads also showed Kremlin stalwarts dominating.
In the North Caucasus region of Chechnya, strongman Ramzan Kadyrov looked set to win the first electoral test of his rule after rights groups said that criticism was ruthlessly silenced during the campaign, winning nearly 98 per cent of the vote with 25 per cent counted. The results are likely to change as votes in the west of Russian Federation are counted. How true that was was still being debated on Monday. The vote can be seen as a mandate for Putin and a continuation of the status quo, as serious opposition to his administration remains muffled and the state-controlled Russian media offered little attention to his opponents, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Before today the unauthorized opposition, the so-called “nonsystem opposition”, had only one lawmaker in the parliament, and its leaders and activists have been continuously harassed and occasionally physically attacked. Pamfilova declared that the elections were “legitimate”. With the country wrapped in nationalist sentiment following Crimea’s annexation and intensified repression of dissent, there is virtually no desire for major political change.
Head of the Central Election Commission Ella Pamfilova (left) speaks during a news conference on the preliminary results of a parliamentary election in Moscow, Russia, September 19, 2016.
Many Russians said they can’t remember a more lackluster election run.
Results indicated that liberal opposition groups would not make it into parliament, with neither the Yabloko party, nor the Parnas party of former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and assassinated Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, having secured enough votes to win a seat.
Turnout in the election was just 47%, the lowest in the history of modern Russian Federation.
Turnout was estimated at 47.99 percent.
Two other seats were won by candidates from small parties and one by an independent.
“The situation is tough and hard but the people still voted for United Russia”, he said on state television.
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“At the very least, it opposes the trend of authoritarianism that has appeared in Russian Federation recently”, Lev Karakhan, a television producer accompanied by his children said after voting.
