Sunday saw a raft of elections for local legislatures across Russia. Probably the most significant result of the weekend was for the Pensioners’ Party, who crept past United Russia to finish first in Tomsk. The St Petersburg Times, as a part of their roundup of election results, reports:
The Pensioner’s Party garnered slightly more than 19 percent of the vote in Sunday’s elections, while United Russia received slightly more than 17 percent, according to preliminary results released Monday, Interfax reported.
The result was unusual because United Russia, which dominates the State Duma, has managed to muster a majority in more than half of the country’s regional legislatures over the past two years.
The Pensioners’ Party aren’t going to make any great waves on the national scene – after all, they won withjust 19% of the votes on a 31% turnout – but it is very interesting to see just how fragmented and unpredictable the political party scene in Russia remains. While the electorate seems happy to rally behind one Presidential candidate every four years, we haven’t seen any political parties at all really emerge from the crowd in the almost decade and a half since the end of the Soviet Union.
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