Putin’s party wins supermajority in Russia’s parliamentary election

President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has won a record supermajority in tightly orchestrated parliamentary polls that excluded virtually any genuine opposition, near complete official results show.

With over 58 percent of votes secured, United Russia, which has dominated Russian politics for 25 years, is on track to win more than three quarters of the seats in the lower house, the State Duma, according to the results announced on Monday after three days of voting that ended on Sunday.

The polls were the first parliamentary vote since Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022 and the first to include residents of four Ukrainian regions that were seized and illegally annexed by Moscow later that year.

Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Dmitry Medvedenko said the results, along with a high voter turnout of almost 60 percent, “is likely to be seen by Moscow as emboldening, as public support for what it is doing, especially for what it’s doing in Ukraine for the continuation of the war”.

Ella Pamfilova, chair of the Central Electoral Commission, said Yabloko, the only registered anti-war party in Russia, did not win any seats at the national level. It had been removed from the ballot last month by Russia’s Supreme Court and only had a few dozen candidates in single-seat races.

Yabloko did enter the regional parliament in western Russia’s Novgorod region. It said on social media that it received about 12,000 votes – just over six percent of votes and enough to enter the regional legislature.

Yabloko and the Communist Party, which has criticised some aspects of government policy but carefully avoided any criticism of Putin, said many of their observers were turned away from polling stations.

The Communists made it into parliament with 13.8 percent of the vote, securing 40 Duma seats. The nationalist LDPR party won 25 seats and the New People party 20.