According to preliminary data, the United Russia party backed by Putin won over 54 percent of the vote at Sunday’s elections to the State Duma, which will give it a constitutional majority of two-thirds in the lower house of parliament.
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Russian Federation party is on track to win 76 percent of the seats available in Russia’s Duma, the lower house of parliament.
But it was also the election with the lowest turnout in Russia’s history, suggesting many may have been turned off by a system in which the Kremlin wields near-total power – and which could raise questions over legitimacy.
And despite a bruising recession that has hit average Russians hard, Putin’s approval rating remains around 80 percent.
Analysts have seen the voting as a likely referendum on Putin’s expected 2018 run for re-election.
The United Russia party already held the majority in the previous parliament, but added more than 100 more seats with Sunday’s election. “The turnout can not be called low”, said Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov. Taking into consideration the single-member constituencies, the United Russia gains 343 seats in the parliament, with 42 seats for the Communist Party, 39 for the Liberal Democrats and 23 for A Just Russia.
No genuine opposition candidate appeared to have made it into the Duma for its new five-year term. 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.
Overall interest in the vote was down dramatically after a low-key campaign that was dubbed the most boring in recent memory. Voter turnout was slightly less than 48 percent.
Since then the government has cracked down on the right to protest while pledging to stamp out electoral manipulation.
Grigory Melkonyants, co-chairman of the election monitoring group Golos, said the busloads of people may not be a violation, “But observers perceive it as a trick which local officials could be using in order to boost the turnout in their districts”, he told the Associated Press.
Pamfilova said the nationwide vote was “entirely legitimate” and that the commission recorded half the number of violations than in previous elections.
While officials claim that an investigation is underway, this is probably not an isolated incident. Observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe are being allowed to monitor the vote.
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The CEC chair said some 264,000 observers were present at the polling stations throughout the country, including global observers, who in general say that the voting went smoothly.
