Vladimir Putin’s political allies won a landslide victory in a parliamentary election in Russian Federation, almost complete results showed Monday, paving the way for Putin to run for a fourth term as president in 18 months if he chooses to do so.
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Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s ruling party United Russia, which wholly backs the president, has 238 of 450 Duma seats. With such a majority, it can amend constitution or veto a presidential impeachment.
This time, half of the parliament’s seats will be occupied by deputies included in the federal candidate lists of parties that will clear the 5 percent threshold.
But accusations of vote-rigging after the last election in 2011 caused mass street protests against the leader in Moscow.
“We must and will develop our country’s multi-party system and support civil society, including patriotically-inclined non-governmental organizations”, Putin said, not naming any specific organizations he was referring to.
Marietta Tidei, one of the heads of the observer mission, said Pamfilova’s leadership of the election commission, which began five months ago, “has given election stakeholders confidence that the elections can be well-run, yet the low-key campaign shows an overall lack of (public) engagement”. In 2011, 60 percent of the electorate voted.
The Russian leader said the election result was an advance by the Russian voters, to allow his government to mount an economic recovery and continue resisting pressure from overseas.
The voter turnout at the elections to the State Duma stands at 47.81% after 93% of ballots were counted.
However, statisticians argue that United Russia’s huge win could have been plagued with voter fraud. The bank also sees a record-low participation rate in the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg as a form of a protest voting.
“Of course, there can be some minor changes in the results, but on the whole the CEC believes that no major changes are expected”.
The Just Russia party won 6.2 percent, according to the count which is ongoing.
The officials were caught on surveillance camera stuffing paper into the ballot box.
“Sub 50 percent (turnout) was incredibly low in post-Soviet space and I think just shows that opposition voters stayed at home en masse”, Ash later added in a research note.
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Many voters at a polling station in southwest Moscow said the only reason to cast a ballot was to take votes away from United Russia, which has dominated the parliament for more than a decade.
