Regional Elections Highlights: Ruling Elite Re-Elected, Opposition Trolled | News | The Moscow Times
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Nationwide elections that took place Sunday ended with few surprises, leaving most of the governors and lawmakers from the ruling United Russia party in their seats.
People all over Russia voted Sunday for the governors of 21 Russian regions and more than 1,300 heads of small city administrations, together with deputies for 11 regional parliaments and 25 city legislatures.
The only intrigue remains in the Irkutsk region, where acting governor Sergei Yeroshchenko, put forward as a candidate by the United Russia party, was forced into a second round of voting on Sept. 27 by his Communist opponent Sergei Levchenko.
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In some regions, sitting governors were re-elected with phenomenally high results. In the Kemerovo region Aman Tuleyev, who has been governor for almost 20 years now, won 96.7 percent of the votes. His longtime counterpart in Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov, also won more than 95 percent of the votes.
In the Penza, Krasnodar, Bryansk and Leningrad regions the winners — also current acting governors — all got about 80 percent of the vote.
Russian opposition firebrand Alexei Navalny’s Democratic Coalition, which had put forward candidates for the Kostroma regional parliament on the Parnas party ticket, failed to surpass the 5 percent barrier required for representation.
Despite numerous cases of fraud reported by the coalition’s observers on Sunday, Kostroma’s number-one candidate — longtime ally of slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin — admitted defeat.
“We lost. Parnas’ actual result, not counting the rigging and all the fraudulent ballots, is not much higher than the official one. We didn’t make it past the 5 percent barrier,” he wrote on his Facebook page Monday.
