By Annie Domini
MOSCOW: It might have been predictable to some extent, but United Russia scoring eight percentage points higher than the previous parliamentary elections in 2021, has, on the one hand, surprised some, while on the other, got branded as one of the ‘dullest election’ ever, despite the wartime upheavals. The just-concluded elections to the state Duma, the Russian parliament, have consolidated even more President Vladimir Putin’s absolute command on the political economy of his country, which has been at war with its neighbour Ukraine for over four years now.
Yet, instead of the elections being a hard referendum on Putin, as naively expected by many in the European political circles, the Duma polls have underlined the immense hold Putin has on the Russian political and economic system, as well as on the hearts and minds of ordinary Russians themselves, who trust no other leader as they do their president for over a quarter century, currently serving his fifth term.
United Russia, led by Putin and his trusted comrade, former president Dmitry Medvedev, has come out on top of the Duma elections, garnering a landslide 57 per cent of the votes counted, higher than the party’s 2021 tally. This extraordinary result comes in the face of the ongoing Ukraine war, massive US-led Western sanctions on Russian oil, gas and other exports, as well as the near-paranoia in Europe about a ‘coming war with Russia’. It is obvious that in these uncertain times, the one thing the Russians didn’t want to see changed was the supreme command of their national politics, and thus voted in massive numbers to bolster the Putin/Medvedev-led socially-centrist and economically-liberal ruling party, United Russia. Moreover, the official voter turnout this time was also higher than the last two Duma elections.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the chief opposition party in Russia, meanwhile, saw its tally come down from 19% to 14%, a big slide. The reasons accorded to the meagre performance of the Russian Communists range from one, the loss of their oppositional role insofar as being in consonance with United Russia over most of the foreign policy decisions of President Putin, two, a geriatric leadership under Gennady Zyuaganov, and three, old-fashioned campaign without adopting cutting-edge social media savvy methods of outreach.
Others like the pro-Western liberal New People party saw some improvement at 8% voter tally, while the far-right LDPR got 9%, and the left-nationalist Fair Russia scored barely 5%. Overall, Russia remains firmly in the reins of Putin, where European-style liberalism, whether economic or socio-political, has very few takers, and no political outfit other than United Russia has displayed much political ingenuity to address the issues being faced by the country at the moment.
Having scored an absolute majority, Putin-led United Russia will get more or less a compliant Duma, thus ensuring continuity of the executive decisions undertaken by the president, including managing the war-time economy, focusing on ties with BRICS partners like China, India as well as Iran, all the while fending off an ever-more hardening international theatre of tariffs, sanctions and war.
Moreover, with Europe constantly fuelling the fires of a potential all-out conflagration with Russia, a compliant Duma is one less worry for Kremlin. The expected lack of internal turbulence in the five-year term of the newly-elected Duma will help make hard decisions pass the parliamentary muster relatively easily, given the all-out geopolitical chaos unfolding in the world right now. (IPA Service)
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