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.
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Second is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) with 13.53%, followed by the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (13.28%) and leftist A Just Russia (6.19%).
United Russia, which is set to remain the largest party, was created by Mr Putin 15 years ago and is headed by Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev.
In a supposed historic election, United Russia won 343 seats in the Duma, the country’s legislative body, giving the party a 76 percent supermajority.
The voting for the 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, wasn’t expected to substantially change the distribution of power, in which the pro-Kremlin United Russia party holds an absolute majority.
With almost 90 per cent of the votes counted, the party had 54.3 per cent of ballots, securing it at least 338 seats in the 450-member parliament.
“People have shown good citizenship”, said Russian President Vladimir Putin, commenting on the elections, for which turnout is estimated at 47.81 percent.
Russian state media reported a turnout of around 80 percent in Russian-controlled Crimea, Euronews reported yesterday. Ten other parties failed to get over the five-percent threshold needed to enter parliament.
Russian Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova, who pledged to clean up the notoriously rigged system when she assumed the post earlier this year, said as the polls closed that she saw no reason to nullify the vote in any location, conceding, however, that the election “wasn’t sterile”.
Yet it remains unclear whether or not Putin will run for another presidential term. Many countries, including the United States and those in the European Union, refuse to acknowledge Crimea as a part of Russian Federation. United Russia received just 37% of proportional votes in Moscow but 96% in Chechnya.
There was a low turnout in urban centres like Moscow and St Petersburg and a better turnout in the regions.
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It was vote-rigging which sparked anti-government street protests after the last parliamentary election. Pamfilova declared that the elections were “legitimate”. Parnas, founded by slain politician Boris Nemtsov, won no seats in the single-constituency districts that are a few feature of these elections, although there was a chance the established Yabloko party could win a seat, The Moscow Times reports.
