The United Russia is going to receive 343 mandates for 76.22% of seats in the 7th State Duma according to preliminary results of the Central Election Commission (CEC).
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“We can say with certainty that the party has achieved a very good result; it’s won”, Putin said at United Russia’s headquarters in Moscow shortly after polls closed Sunday.
That is up from 238 seats in the last parliamentary election, in 2011, and would allow United Russia to change the constitution, although Putin can run again under the existing one as he was prime minister between his second and third terms.
There were 450 seats up for grabs in the lower house of the Russian parliament (the State Duma), with 4,500 candidates running across 14 parties.
The landslide victory of the ruling United Russia party was a public vote of confidence in President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said on Monday. “The situation is not easy and people see it – and they want the political system and society to remain stable”, the president said, as quoted by TASS.
Those four parties – which made up the last parliament and all back the Kremlin – were the only ones to clear the five percent threshold needed to claim a share of the one-half of seats up for grabs. United Russia’s support had appeared to suffer as a result, slumping in recent opinion polls to about 40 percent from 60 percent 18 months ago. That would give Putin΄s party 338 seats in the Duma in total, or almost 100 more than in the 2011 parliamentary election. They also indicate support for President Putin and his United Russia Party remains strong despite sanctions and economic difficulties.
“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.
In addition, Shpilkin’s graph is spiked because there were an improbable number of polling stations at the high end of the turnout scale reporting round-number turnouts ending in 5 or 0, such as 75, 80, or 85 percent.
The Communist Party and nationalist LDPR both secured just over 13%.
This concerns ballot station 2211 in the Nizhny Novgorod region and ballot station 1958 in the Rostov region, she said.
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Nevertheless, the elections took part at the peninsula, annexed from Ukraine. “Opposition parties can only succeed in Russian Federation when the turnout is high”.
