Russia’s ruling United Russia party, which supports the president, Vladimir Putin, appears poised to maintain a constitutional majority in Russia’s state parliament, mysteriously outperforming its sluggish polling numbers in an election marred by accusations of vote rigging.
With more than 99% of the votes counted, United Russia held nearly 50% of the parliamentary vote, according to government results. But election officials said the party was also winning 198 of the 225 first-past-the-post districts, meaning it will continue to hold a two-thirds majority and can enact Kremlin policy including changes to the Russian constitution.
The Communist party was in second place with 19.41%, a boost from previous elections due to considerable anger with the government over rising prices, stagnant wages and the government’s erratic coronavirus response.
Several prominent Communist candidates in Moscow have called for a protest on Monday evening after online voting results flipped races in eight of 15 Moscow districts toward pro-Kremlin candidates.
Two or three other parties that regularly agree with the Kremlin on key issues will also join a Duma dominated by United Russia.
The European Union, Britain and the United States all condemned the vote. A UK Foreign Office spokesman said Russia had sought to “marginalise civil society, silence independent media and exclude genuine opposition candidates from participating” in “a serious step back for democratic freedoms in Russia.”
The US Department of State spokesman Ned Price said the vote “took place under conditions not conducive to free and fair proceedings”, adding that Washington would not recognise the results of votes held in Crimea, which was annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The UK also condemned Russia for holding elections “on Ukraine’s sovereign territory”.
The performance of the ruling party was slightly weaker than in 2016, when United Russia won 54% of the vote. But the results mean that little will change in Russian politics, where Putin recently led an effort to change the constitution so that he can run for president twice more until 2036.
Andrey Turchak, a top United Russia official, said the party had won at least 315 seats in the parliament in a “convincing and clean victory”. But many others, including some Communist candidates and backers of the jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, have disagreed.
Videos from polling stations showed the usual efforts at ballot stuffing and attempts to drive off vote monitors keeping a close eye on the ballot urns. But the greater scandal came on Monday morning, as the results of nearly 2m online votes flipped many of the elections that appeared to be going against the Kremlin’s preferred candidates.
“The electric votes gave [my opponent Evgeny] Popov a lead of 20,000 votes. I know that this result is impossible,” wrote Mikhail Lobanov, a Communist candidate who held a 10,000-vote lead at polling stations. “So I call on all candidates who disagree with the results of the electronic voting to gather today and discuss further actions.” He later said he would be at Pushkin Square, a common protest site, at 7pm.
“Hundreds of thousands of people voted for us,” Lobanov wrote. “Yes, it was a protest vote but I believe that now we, the candidates of the word ‘no,’ are responsible for defending these votes together with the electorate.”
The Communist party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, also said the party would reject the results of the elections in Moscow and call for an investigation into the online voting results. But Zyuganov, often accused of playing “loyal opposition” to Putin, did not immediately back a street protest.
Bringing protesters out on the streets is a red line for the Kremlin. The largest protests of the last decade broke out in 2011 over fraud at parliamentary elections. Since then, the Kremlin has employed various tactics to prevent similar outbursts of discontent.
The main target of the Kremlin’s ire before the elections was Navalny and his supporters, some of whom have been blocked from the elections or driven out of the country ahead of the three-day vote.
His supporters organised a tactical voting drive to push support towards the strongest opposition candidates, including Communists who rarely find common cause with liberal Moscow voters.
The Kremlin, using a court decision declaring Navalny’s organisations to be “extremist”, successfully pressured Google and Apple to remove applications and other links to Navalny’s Smart Voting initiative. The capitulation was a watershed concession by Big Tech, which has resisted pressure from the Kremlin to censor opposition content and hold its user data in Russia. Telegram, a popular messaging service, also blocked bots that could tell voters who was backed by the Smart Voting initiative.
On Monday, the presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin viewed the “electoral process very, very positively” in terms of its “competitiveness, openness, and fairness”.
At a celebratory rally at United Russia’s headquarters broadcast on state television, the Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, a close ally of the Russian leader, shouted: “Putin! Putin! Putin!” to a flag-waving crowd that echoed his chant.