The Ruling United Russia party won in parliamentary polls for seats in the seventh State Duma, garnering 51 percent of the votes, 25 percent of which have been counted.
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With the results near final, the Central Election Commission said that United Russia will receive a total of 343 mandates (76.22 percent of the seats in parliament), reports state-run TASS news agency.
It was followed by the Communists and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, on 13.5 percent and 13.3 percent respectively, and A Just Russia, which received 6.2 percent, results published by the election commission showed.
Given the Kremlin’s stranglehold on media, parties loyal to Putin were always expected to maintain their dominance at the vote – but the scale of the win for United Russia has surprised many.
Vladimir Putin’s ruling party is set for victory in Russia’s parliamentary elections despite a dip in support, preliminary results suggest.
“We can say with certainty that the party has achieved a very good result; it’s won”, Putin said at United Russia’s headquarters in Moscow shortly after polls closed Sunday.
Russia’s previous State Duma ended its last five-year term with only one member who was viewed as genuine opposition.
Still, after the mass protests five years ago at alleged vote falsifications, the elections proceeded in a “relatively fair” manner, said Bunin.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, told reporters that the “overwhelming majority” of voters had come out for Putin, handing him what he called “an impressive vote of confidence”.
The vote comes as Putin’s approval ratings remain high at around 80 percent and authorities appear to be banking on trouble-free presidential elections in two years.
However, as one of Russia’s unofficial opposition parties, not approved by the Kremlin, it faces heavy restrictions.
Liberal opposition parties, the only group openly critical of President Putin, reportedly failed to get over the 5% threshold needed for party representation.
Half of the 450-seat State Duma is elected through party lists.
Election observers have weighed in on Russia’s parliamentary election, saying the vote fell short of being free and fair.
But the election observer mission of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe pointedly said that Russians felt widely disengaged from the political process. Golos, an independent monitoring group, said it received nearly 700 complaints such as ballot-stuffing and multiple voting, including one in which a bus full of workers was seen at seven polling stations in Moscow.
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The authorities have cracked down on the right to protest in the last few years so there are even fewer outlets for criticising Putin.
