United Russia party (ER) won the Sunday's elections to the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. According to the results, United Russia received 44,5 percent of the votes. It is followed by the parties - the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) - 13,45%, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) - 13,24%, and Fair Russia (SR, also known as A Just Russia) - 6,17%. The remaining parties did not exceed the required 5-percent electoral threshold. The turnout in Sunday's elections was around 48 percent. The opposition parties did not obtain the right amount of votes to enter their candidates from electoral lists to the parliament. The two main liberal parties Yabloko and PARNAS (People's Freedom Party) received only 1.89% and 0.7% of the votes.

Elections to the State Duma were held accordingly to a mixed electoral system: 225 deputies were selected from party lists and another 225 in single-seat constituencies.

With the party list for the Duma will hit 140 deputies. United Russia won 203 of the 225 single-mandate constituencies. This result provides a batch of 343 of the 450 seats in parliament. In the previous elections in 2011, United Russia received 49.32 percent of the votes. With this result will have a qualified majority (2/3 of votes) in the State Duma.

In previous elections, the turnout was close to 60 percent. This year, President Putin moved the date of the election from December to September. The opposition raised the protest, because it felt that at that time numerous of Russians are staying on holidays or they are engaged at work of harvesting. This often prevents voting.

According to the Central Election Commission, this year's elections were held in a democratic atmosphere. On Monday afternoon, the OSCE observers will submit a report about the legitimacy of the election. Some observers stress that Russia still has a place dealings "managed democracy", which is a system that only seemingly represents the democratic system and presupposes the existence of democratic institutions.

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