It was a result that came as no surprise- the ruling United Russia party, backed by Vladimir Putin, won the parliamentary election with more than 54 percent of the votes.
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With 93 per cent of votes counted, it secured at least 343 seats in the 450-member Duma, or Lower House of Parliament, up from 238 previously, results announced yesterday by the election commission showed.
The Communists and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party won 13.36 percent and 13.18 percent respectively, while A Just Russia received 6.2 percent.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political party, United Russia, has won a majority in the country’s parliamentary elections.
United Russia last enjoyed a constitutional majority in the 2007-2011 State Duma, with 315 seats.
The pro-Kremlin United Russia party is expected to retain its dominance and the three other largely cooperative parties in the current parliament are also expected to win seats.
People choose stability and trust in government by voting for the governing United Russia party in the face of risks and difficulties, Putin said.
13,832 Russian citizens living in Latvia took part in the elections, the Russian Embassy in Riga told BNS.
Putin’s next target is the presidential election in 2018. In big cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg, activity was below 30%. The Communists won seven of the single-mandate seats, as did A Just Russia, while LDPR won five.
Election officials said that turnout was almost 48 percent, substantially lower than the 60 percent turnout at the last parliamentary election.
But accusations of vote-rigging after the last election in 2011 caused mass street protests against the leader in Moscow.
“Voting against the authority in more traditional, rural areas of Russian Federation is still something of a revolution”, said Abbas Gallyamov, a political scientist and an adviser to several candidates.
Medvedev called these elections as a victory for the party.
No other party cleared the 5-percent mark need to win party-list seats.
The Kremlin was desperate to avoid a repeat this time round and has cracked down on the right to protest while making a show of stamping out electoral fraud.
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.
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Pamfilova admitted there were problems in several regions but said that “the level of transparency was incomparably higher than in the previous electoral campaign”. Some ballot box stuffing was even caught on camera.
