Russia’s parliamentary elections brought a landslide win for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia and its allies, in a vote that gives Putin a free hand in the country he first led in 2000.
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The Kremlin’s power-base party has won a record number of seats in national parliament elections that could pave the way for President Vladimir Putin to glide to a fourth term in the 2018 elections. “Obviously, a large majority of voters have indirectly thrown their support behind the president”, said Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. Parnas, founded by slain politician Boris Nemtsov, won no seats in the single-constituency districts that are a few feature of these elections, although there was a chance the established Yabloko party could win a seat, The Moscow Times reports.
Other parties trailed far behind United Russia. That’s well above the 238 it held before the poll and more than two-thirds of seats in the lower house, which is sufficient to change the constitution. The new election laws have come into force under Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, United Russia’s leader.
The vote comes as Putin’s ratings remain high at around 80 percent, and the authorities appear to be banking on trouble-free presidential elections in two years’ time. The Communists will have 42 seats in the new Duma, a sharp drop from 92, the nationalist Liberal Democrats 39 and A Just Russia 23.
During Putin’s 16 years in charge, those at the top have fashioned a system of “managed democracy” in the country that has turned the Duma into a slavishly pro-Kremlin talking shop and snuffed out genuine opposition.
“It is obvious that the overwhelming majority of voters in fact expressed their support for the president”.
As pollsters predicted, turnout was low at around 47 percent.
The head of the Russian office of AASY Togrul Allahverdili said that they observed the voting in almost 100 polling stations, adding no irregularities were registered.
Previous elections have shown that the regions with the highest turnout were where voters, mostly state employees, were pressured to cast ballots. Videos of ballot stuffing at some polling stations were also widely shared, although they had not evoked calls for protests similar to 2011. One video showed an election worker cramming ballots into a box, and in one part of Siberia, there were reports of “carousel voting”, in which a group of people are bussed to different voting stations to cast ballots a few times. Reports surfaced suggesting the notoriously rigged elections had not ceased, despite Russian Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova’s pledge to clean up the system.
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The U.S. State Department also noted Monday that the election commission “administered the elections transparently”, but added that it shares OSCE observers’ concern about limitations during the candidate registration process, misuse of administrative resources by some local authorities during the campaign and harassment of opposition members.
