The United Russia party backed by President Vladimir Putin has won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections, near final results showed on Monday morning, meaning the ruling party is on track to win 343 seats or 76 percent of 450 available seats in Russia’s Duma, the Central Election Commission said after 93 percent of ballots had been counted.
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“We can say with certainty that the party has won”, Putin told campaign workers at the United Russia headquarters, standing alongside United Russia leader and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
United Russia will now hold an estimated 303 of 450 seats in the Russia’s next parliament when it convenes in October, enough to vote in changes to Russia’s constitution on a strict, party-line vote.
The huge gain of more than 100 seats for United Russia, which held a majority in the previous parliament, raises it above the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution on its own.
“Once more, we see the president gain an impressive vote of confidence from the people”.
“It’s obvious that the overwhelming majority of those who voted de facto voiced support for the president”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Those moves led many to predict the elections would not see significant amounts of voting fraud.
The last parliamentary election in 2011 was marked by widespread allegations of vote fraud, prompting anti-government demonstrations.
According to preliminary estimations released by the Central Elections Commission on Monday afternoon, United Russia garnered over 54 percent of votes cast for political parties’ federal lists of candidates.
But despite Russia’s economic malaise and tensions with the West over the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, some observers had called the election campaign the dullest in recent memory. United Russia received just 37% of proportional votes in Moscow but 96% in Chechnya. It is also the first time that the mixed principles had been used in the elections in the State Duma since 2003, 2007 and 2011.
After the last election, anger at ballot-rigging prompted large protests in Moscow, and the Kremlin will be anxious to avoid a repetition of that.
The Communist Party will have 42 mandates (9.34 percent), followed by Liberal Democratic Party (39 – 8.67 percent), A Just Russia (23 – 5.11 percent), while Rodina, Civic Platform (Grazhdanskaya Platforma) and independent Vladislav Reznik will have one mandate each, TASS has reported.
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It is also the first time that the mixed principle has been used in elections to the State Duma since 2003, as in 2007 and 2011 Russians elected MPs from federal party lists only. A compilation video posted by RFE/RL shows what appear to be elections officials stuffing ballot boxes in Rostov-on-Don, Makhachkala, and in Nizhny Novgorod, where elections officials reportedly suspended voting at one polling place shown in the video. The Communist Party and two other parties loyal to Putin also secured seats in proportional voting. While the party’s support was similar to the 50 percent it gained five years ago, it will emerge with more than its current 238 seats after the authorities changed the election rules.
