President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party won a record 355 seats in Russia’s 450-seat Duma lower house of parliament, according to preliminary results from the three-day election released by electoral chief Ella Pamfilova on Sept. 21.
With almost all votes counted from the poll, in which no parties critical of Putin took part, results showed the presidential party will have a supermajority larger than its previous 2016 record of 343 seats.
It was Russia’s first parliamentary election since Moscow launched its Ukraine offensive in 2022.
The Kremlin tightly controls elections and Moscow has banned criticism of its military campaign in Ukraine.
Pamfilova said turnout was more than 59 percent, thanking Russians for voting despite what she called “psychological pressure” on the country.
Russia’s Communist party came second, winning 40 seats.
The nationalist LDPR party took 25 seats and the New People party winning 20 seats.
United Russia has dominated politics since the early 2000s and Putin has been in power since New Year’s Eve 1999.
Pamfilova said that more than 95 percent of votes have been counted and that final results will be announced later this week.
EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas, meanwhile, on Sept. 21 dismissed Russia’s parliamentary elections as a “veneer” of democracy and said she was proposing sanctions on those who helped hold them in occupied Ukraine.
“The so-called Duma elections marked another major setback for Russian democracy. Their outcome was never in doubt,” Kallas wrote on X.
“The Kremlin silenced dissent, barred the only registered party that opposed its war in Ukraine, and shut out international election monitors. The veneer of democracy is all that remains in Russia.”
Kallas said she had “proposed measures against those facilitating these sham elections in occupied Ukrainian territories.”
The EU has already sanctioned some 3,000 officials and entities over the war on Ukraine, including Putin.
The election, held to elect members in all seats of the lower house State Duma, is the first since Moscow launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
No party opposed to the war was allowed to run, with Russia’s Supreme Court removing the anti-war Yabloko party off the ballot weeks before the vote.
According to results reported by Russian news agencies after just over 71 percent of ballots were counted, United Russia took 57.5 percent of the vote.
The Communist Party and LDPR nationalists trailed behind on 14 and 8.7 percent respectively.
