“In comparison to the 2011 campaign, the link to Putin was much stronger this time”, said Alexei Chesnakov, a former Kremlin political adviser and the director of the Center for Current Politics, a Moscow group that analyzes political and economic trends in Russian Federation.
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The ruling United Russia party won 51 percent in Sunday’s election, according to a preliminary central election commission tally after a quarter of the votes had been counted.
Sergei Neverov, secretary of United Russia’s General Council, hailed the result on Monday as an endorsement of Putin. The results are likely to change as votes in the west of Russian Federation are counted.
The poll also caused a diplomatic spat with Ukraine as residents on the Crimea peninsula elected candidates to Russia’s parliament for the first time since Moscow annexed the region in 2014.
Liberal opposition parties failed to win any seats.
The ruling party received almost three times as much support as the second-placed nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, which got 15.3 percent, according to the survey of more than 112,000 voters by the VTsIOM polling company.
With 93 per cent of the votes counted, United Russia was on track to take 343 of the 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, with 54 per cent of the vote, Central Elections Commission head Ella Pamfilova announced.
Golos independent election monitors said in a statement on Monday that “there were fewer incidents of gross direct falsification than in 2011” but that the vote was “far from what can truly be called free and fair” because of the ruling party’s domination of the campaign.
That is up from 238 seats in the last parliamentary election and enough to allow United Russia to unilaterally change the constitution, though Putin can run again for the presidency under the existing one because he was prime minister between his second and third terms.
People visit a polling station during a parliamentary election in Stavropol, Russia, Sept. 18, 2016.
Russian officials are concerned that widespread allegations of vote fraud could spark protests similar to the massive demonstrations after elections in 2011.
In the 2011 election for the lower house, or State Duma, United Russia won 49 per cent of the vote.
Yevgeny Korsak, a 65-year-old pensioner in the city of Saransk, 600 km (375 miles) south-east of Moscow, said he had voted for United Russia “because it is strong and powerful”.
The election observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe pointedly said that Russians felt widely disengaged from the political process. The observers also noted “self-censorship encouraged by the restrictive legal and regulatory framework”.
Ms Pamfilova said that reports of irregularities had been received from three districts.
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.
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No other party cleared the 5-percent mark need to win party-list seats.
