Russia’s ruling United Russia party scored an overwhelming victory in the country’s first parliamentary elections since the start of the war in Ukraine, in a vote tightly controlled by the Kremlin and with virtually no genuine opposition on the ballot.
The party got nearly 58 per cent support with 90 per cent of the vote counted, state newswires reported, citing Russia’s Central Election Commission. The Communist Party was second with 14 per cent, followed by the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party with 9 per cent.
United Russia, which campaigned as president Vladimir Putin’s party, has held a majority in the lower house of parliament since 2003. It is poised to regain the constitutional majority of more than two-thirds of seats that it held in the previous parliament.
The result after Moscow and its surrounding region came under attack by hundreds of drones on the final day of parliamentary, regional and local elections across Russia.
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About 1,600 drones heading toward the Moscow region were shot down, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Sunday, including 450 that had been approaching the Russian capital. He called the attack the largest drone strike on Moscow of the war.
Two people were killed and 20 injured in the strike, Russian authorities said. An oil refinery and a warehouse were also hit.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy posted on Facebook that the bombardment included the first use of a newly developed Ukrainian ballistic missile to strike inside Russia.
That missile does not have the range to reach Moscow, according to its manufacturer, Fire Point, so it would have been aimed elsewhere in Russia.
Half of the 450 seats in the State Duma, as the lower chamber of parliament is called, are allocated by party list and the other half are contested in single-member constituencies. The election commission said turnout was 57 per cent, state television reported, exceeding the level of the last election in 2021.
The New People, which bills itself as a pragmatic, business-friendly party, is one more party that is also set to clear the 5 per cent threshold to return to the Duma as it got 8 per cent of the vote.
With the vote, the Kremlin aimed to showcase strong support for Putin’s war in Ukraine, now well into its fifth year. As Russia’s military incurs large casualties for little progress on the battlefield, there are fears among Russians that the Kremlin plans a new mass mobilisation to draft hundreds of thousands into the army after the elections.
Putin denies he has any such plans, calling the suggestion of a draft “complete nonsense” earlier this month.
All parties on the ballot supported Putin over the war – conceived as a “special military operation” lasting days or weeks and offered no criticism of the president’s domestic policies.
After the liberal Yabloko party announced it would campaign on a “for peace and freedom” platform, it was barred last month from the party list for the State Duma by Russia’s Supreme Court for alleged violations of electoral rules. Some individual candidates remained on the ballot for the single-mandate contests.
Besides the Duma vote, elections were also held for legislative bodies in 39 Russian regions and municipal bodies in 10 constituent territories of Russia. Governors in 11 regions were also elected.
The final day of the election was marked by one of the heaviest Ukrainian drone attacks since the start of the war. Russia’s defense ministry said it downed 1,110 Ukrainian drones across 19 Russian regions as well as Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014. That was the largest overnight total reported so far this year, surpassing the previous high of 822 in August. – Bloomberg
