President Vladimir Putin leveraged his popularity to assert even greater control over Russia’s already malleable Parliament in national elections, with almost complete results released Monday showing the ruling United Russia party gaining an absolute majority of seats.
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The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe sent more than 400 observers to Russian Federation to monitor the election, about double that of 2011 when the OSCE sent 215 to monitor the parliamentary poll.
Results indicated that liberal opposition groups would not make it into parliament, with neither the Yabloko party, nor the Parnas party of former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and assassinated Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, having secured enough votes to win a seat.
“The bill on next year’s state budget is not going to become hostage to the electoral campaign, and I am sure that the State Duma will exhibit more professionalism, not populism, when considering the budget bill”, he said in remarks to the Interfax news service that were published on Monday. Putin’s spokesperson called it “an impressive vote of confidence” in the Russian leader and dismissed critics who noted a sharp fall in turnout.
If not a vote on their past work, he said, it must be their future work, “an advance on the part of our people”, that got them the vote, “and we now must live up to their expectations”.
The election for lawmakers comes 18 months ahead of the next presidential election.
Other parties trailed far behind.
Among voting irregularities witnessed by Reuters were several people voting twice in one polling station in the Mordovia region of central Russian Federation. “This characterises the age structure of voters, as most of the voters who came to the polls were of an advanced age”, added the spokesman. Official results in another area showed a turnout double that recorded on the spot.
It is an enormous gain – more than 100 seats – for the party that held a majority in the previous parliament, and gives it enough strength to amend the constitution on its own. No others cleared the 5-percent mark needed to win party-list seats.
But the low turnout and general climate of intimidation prevented even that.
Cameras monitoring polling stations caught officials at several of these slipping papers into ballot boxes while no member of the public was nearby. He was Prime Minister from 1999 to 2000, and then was president from 2000 to 2008 and again Prime Minister from 2008 to 2012.
Most voters do not see any viable alternative to Mr 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.
The Kremlin narrative, frequently repeated on state television, accuses the West of using sanctions to try to wreck the economy in revenge for Moscow’s seizure of Crimea, the Ukrainian region it annexed in 2014.
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Putin has said it is too early to say if he will run in 2018.
