Pro-Kremlin party wins big majority in Russian parliament

Russia’s parliamentary elections brought a landslide win for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia and its allies, in a vote that gives Putin a free hand in the country he first led in 2000.

Pro-Putin parties were always expected to cruise to victory given the Kremlin’s nearly complete dominance of the media – but the scale of United Russia’s majority took some observers by surprise.

“We can announce already with certainty that the party secured a good result, that it won”, Mr. Putin said after the vote.

The three other parties that had seats in the previous State Duma also won seats in the new assembly – the Communists, the nationalist Liberal Democrats and A Just Russia.

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.

Irkutsk region registered one of the lowest turnouts in Russian Federation, with 28.8% on latest figures.

Sunday’s election follows a tumultuous few years that have seen Russian Federation seize the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine, plunge into its worst standoff with the West since the Cold War and start a military campaign in Syria.

Despite the unenthusiastic turnout, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin “once again received a massive vote of confidence from the country’s people”.

The party is also able to draw on the support of the other three parties in the federal Duma, and benefits from its association with Putin, who after 17 years in power as either president or prime minister, enjoys a personal approval rating of about 80 percent.

But the Kremlin exerts nearly complete control over the media and public discourse, and this year’s election campaign was dubbed the dullest in recent memory.

Turnout, however, was distinctly lower than in the last Duma election in 2011 – less than 48 percent nationwide compared with 60 percent.

Urban elites appeared to have felt especially frozen out with the turnout in the biggest cities Moscow and Saint Petersburg below 30 percent.

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. There have been no protests this time.

The former scandal-tainted election chief was removed in favour of a human rights advocate who allowed more genuine opposition candidates to take part.

Pamfilova admitted there were problems in several regions but said that “the level of transparency was incomparably higher than in the previous electoral campaign”. The last parliament was elected on party lists alone.

In the North Caucasus region of Chechnya, strongman Ramzan Kadyrov claimed some 98 percent in the first vote on his decade-long rule after rights groups complained criticism was ruthlessly silenced during his campaign.

The U.S. State Department also noted Monday that the election commission “administered the elections transparently”, but added that it shares OSCE observers’ concern about limitations during the candidate registration process, misuse of administrative resources by some local authorities during the campaign and harassment of opposition members.