The United Russia party of Vladimir Putin saw its popularity ratings crumble in elections in a number of Russian regions where it won barely 30 percent of the vote, results showed Monday. The results for United Russia in Sunday’s polls were particularly weak in regions at the extreme ends of Russia – in the Far East on the Pacific and the Far North – as well as Saint Petersburg and central Siberia.
The weak poll rating of 33.4 percent in the Primorye region around the Far East city of Vladivostok is disturbing for the authorities given the city has been the subject of a multibillion dollar spending programme for an Asian summit next year. At the other end of Russia in the western exclave of Kaliningrad, United Russia polled only 37 percent.
In the northern region of Arkhangelsk it mustered 32 percent. United Russia managed to stay unbeaten in all of Russia’s 83 regions but its failure to win much more than a third of the vote in several highly-populated areas is a major reverse for its previous domination of Russian politics. Its rating in the former imperial capital Saint Petersburg – which had a reputation for intellectual non-conformism even in Soviet days – was low at 33 percent.
But contrary to predictions, its support in Moscow held up at 46 percent, just below the national average, possibly helped by a high-profile campaign by new United Russia mayor Sergei Sobyanin to improve the quality of life in the city. United Russia’s ratings nationwide were boosted to just under 50 percent with the help of mass shows of support in the Northern Caucasus, where Russia is still battling an Islamist insurgency.
The conflict-plagued Dagestan region voted over 91 percent for the ruling party, while in neighbouring Chechnya where Russia waged two wars in the past 15 years, United Russia polled an astonishing 99.50 percent of votes. United Russia also won over 70 percent of the votes in the largely Muslim regions of Tatarstan on the Volga and Bashkortostan, and also gained over 85 percent of the vote in the Siberian Buddhist region of Tuva.
