The ruling United Russia party is expected to win even greater dominance over Russia's lower house in a parliamentary election, showing support for President Vladimir Putin is holding up.(Reuters)
MOSCOW — Russians went to the polls Sunday in a parliamentary vote that the Kremlin hopes will maintain its stranglehold on national politics without provoking protests like those that erupted five years ago over widespread fraud.
As expected, exit polls released Sunday evening on state television suggested that United Russia, the ruling party aligned with President Vladimir Putin, is likely to win. Two exit polls showed United Russia taking just under 50 percent of the vote, and Putin said Sunday evening that the party “had achieved a very good result. They have won.”
Critics have pointed to low turnout, which officials said was 39.4 percent several hours before polls closed, as a sign of waning support for United Russia, a party whose strongest attribute is its association with Putin.
“Skeptics may say that [the result] was not as good as it could have been,” Putin said in televised remarks from United Russia’s elections headquarters . “But nobody works better.”
Journalists and activists also posted a number of reports of ballot stuffing, which may mar the clean image the Kremlin wanted to project in Sunday’s vote.
Portraits of candidates are posted at a polling station during parliamentary elections in Moscow on Sunday. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)
United Russia leads a pack of four parties in parliament that are largely aligned with Putin’s policies and, according to the exit polls, are the only parties that will win seats in the next session of the State Duma.
Besides United Russia, they are the Communist Party, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and the left-leaning A Just Russia party.
Under Putin, the parliament has largely come to be seen as a rubber stamp, nearly unanimously passing legislation to limit public demonstrations, ban foreign adoptions, and increase surveillance of Russian citizens and religious groups under a counterterrorism law passed in June.
A troubled economy and a budget hit by falling oil prices, which have prevented the indexation of pensions and has delayed paychecks across the country, would normally spell disaster for a ruling party, and, indeed, United Russia’s popularity has fallen below 50 percent in recent months. But the party is expected to retain a majority of the 450 seats in the State Duma, or lower house, partially by domination of public media and administrative resources, which puts the power of local and regional governments behind the party, and partially by a strong showing in new single-mandate districts, where voters choose individual officeholders, as in the United States, rather than voting for a political party.
But United Russia’s greatest advantage is that in a political arena dominated by Putin, there is not much of an alternative.
“The president’s party, who else would I vote for?” said Nadezhda Osetinskaya, a 67-year-old pensioner and former nurse who lined up before polls opened at 8 a.m. at a school in northwest Moscow.
Osetinskaya had her share of complaints. Prices for food and medicine are increasing, she said, and she required support from her children to live on her $250 monthly pension. She was unhappy with the quality of care at a hospital where she receives treatment for a kidney ailment. The city had carried out years of road work, she said, but the potholes on her neighborhood streets are legion, probably the result of corruption.
But on broader questions, she enthusiastically supported Putin, lauding the recent annexation of Crimea and blaming Russia’s economic difficulties on a Western conspiracy. Voting for United Russia was a way to support Putin, she reiterated.
“Soon, things will turn around, but for now, we need to stand by our president,” she said. “He’ll remember that we did.”
Many of those voting early were pensioners, as well as workers from schools, the local government administration and other jobs paid for by the city. Out of 20 people approached at one polling station, one man, who gave his name as Mikhail, said he would vote for the liberal Yabloko party.
“I’m still voting against the party of crooks and thieves,” he said, a reference to a protest slogan against United Russia from 2011, when viral videos of ballot stuffing brought more than 50,000 Muscovites onto the frigid streets to chant, “Russia without Putin!” The protest movement petered out in 2012 because of internal differences among the protesters and a government crackdown.
The Kremlin’s strategy during this election cycle has been to emphasize legitimacy, installing Ella Pamfilova, a well-regarded former human rights ombudsman, as the elections chief.
At a news conference last week, Pamfilova said that she will resign if the elections are marred by fraud and that the primary culprits in vote-rigging are generally local power-brokers seeking to please the Kremlin.
Sunday’s vote marks the first time that Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, will take part in Russian parliamentary elections, eliciting protests from Ukraine and the United States.
