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Pro-Putin party tipped for more sway in Russia Duma elections
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THE ruling United Russia party is expected to win even greater dominance over Russia’s lower house in a parliamentary election yesterday, showing that support for President Vladimir Putin is holding up despite sanctions and a deep economic slowdown.
The election for the Duma, or lower house, is being seen as a dry run for Putin’s expected presidential campaign in 2018.
Voting got under way at 2000 GMT on Saturday on the Chukotka Peninsula opposite Alaska and will wrap up in Kaliningrad, Russia’s most westerly point, where people can cast their vote until 1800 GMT yesterday.
“Of course I voted for United Russia,” a middle-aged man in the town of Velikiye Luki in western Russia said. “We don’t need other parties here. At least they (United Russia) have done their stealing.”
An elderly lady in the village of Avangard in the Tula Region, which abuts the Moscow Region, said she had always voted for United Russia and saw no other parties worth voting for.
“We don’t need a multi-party system,” she said.
United Russia, led by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, has 238 of 450 Duma seats, dominates the more than 80 regional parliaments.
The party is able to draw on the support of the other three parties in the federal Duma, and benefits from its association with 63-year-old Putin, who after 17 years in power as either president or prime minister, enjoys a personal approval rating of about 80 percent. Putin does not belong to any party.
By contrast, liberal opposition politicians have just one sympathetic member in the Duma. The liberal opposition hopes it can break through to win about two dozen seats. Pollsters say it will be lucky to snag a handful and may end up with none.
Putin has said it is too early to say if he will go for what would be a fourth presidential term in 2018. If he did and won, he would be in power until 2024, longer than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Putin, after voting in Moscow, told reporters he now planned to “go to work.” When asked who he had voted for he said: “I have someone to vote for don’t you know.”
The election is the first time that voters in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, are helping decide the makeup of the Duma. That has angered the Ukrainian government and there were scuffles between Ukrainian nationalists and police outside the Russian embassy in Kiev yesterday after a few nationalists tried to stop Russian citizens from voting there.
Polls show United Russia’s popularity has been somewhat dented by a grinding economic crisis caused by a fall in global oil prices and compounded by Western sanctions over Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis. But they also show that Putin’s own popularity remains high.
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