Pro-Putin parties were always expected to cruise to victory given the Kremlin’s nearly complete dominance of the media – but the scale of United Russia’s majority took some observers by surprise.
Advertisement
United Russia won 343 seats of the total of 450 in the Duma, the Central Election Commission said, after 93 percent of ballots had been counted.
Putin also praised the efforts of United Russia MPs and other party officials in making the lives of the Russian people better.”They work as effectively as possible”. United Russia will take more than three-quarters of the 450 seats in the Duma. In contrast to the two previous elections, only half the seats in this election were chosen by national party list; the others were contested by single-seat districts.
Anger over widespread fraud in the 2011 election sparked large protests that unsettled authorities by their size and persistence.
Liberal opposition parties failed to win any seats.
Election Commission Head, Ella Pamfilova, had said earlier that she was “fully confident that the elections are proceeding in a quite legitimate way”, but she later warned that results at three polling stations might be cancelled because of irregularities.
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.
Polling stations have closed in Russia’s parliamentary, regional and municipal elections.
Medvedev also called the election results “a victory” for the party.
Mr Putin said it was a “good result” and people voted for his party even though “things are tough” with the economy.
The election for the Duma, or lower house, is being seen as a dry run for Putin’s expected presidential campaign in 2018.
10,425 or 75 per cent of them cast their votes for United Russia, President Vladimir Putin’s political party. Observers reported a raft of violations that have typically dogged Russian elections – such as ballot stuffing and multiple voting – but conceded there seemed to have been less of that than last time. During this campaign, Nemstov ally Mikhail Kasyanov, who leads the PARNAS opposition party, was undermined by a lurid, secretly filmed video that showed him sharing a bed – and thoughts about Russian politics – with a female associate. The Communist Party was in second place, followed by the Liberal Democrat Party and the A Just Russia Party, in a record-low voter turnout.
“We are not a Russian island – we are United Russia”, reads a party political ad on a Kaliningrad tram.
Advertisement
Over half of Russian citizens who voted in Lithuania backed United Russia, preliminary results indicate.
