Putin sweeps to victory and tells voters ‘we are bound for success’
● President secures fourth term with nearly 77% of the vote
president Vladimir Putin has won a fourth term in office with nearly 77 per cent of the vote – his highest ever score – giving him a mandate to pursue his nationalist policies for another six years.
Near-final results showed that the other seven candidates were far behind Mr Putin in the polls.
Observers reported widespread ballot-stuffing and unprecedented pressure on Russians to vote, but that is unlikely to seriously damage Mr Putin given his popularity and his tight control over Russian politics.
With 99.8 per cent of the vote counted, the Central Election Commission said communist Pavel Grudinin came in a distant second with 11.9 per cent.
Third was ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky with 5.7 per cent.
The only candidate to openly criticise Mr Putin during the campaign, liberal TV star Ksenia Sobchak, secured just 1.7 per cent.
Mr Putin’s most serious rival, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was barred from the race because of a fraud conviction widely seen as politically motivated.
The electoral commission said official turnout was 67 per cent.
However, the figure was marred by widespread account of workers being coerced to vote and numerous incidents of ballot-stuffing.
Mr Putin has never faced a serious threat to his rule since he came to power on the eve of the new millennium.
He won 53 per cent of the vote in the 2000 presidential election, 71 per cent in 2004 and 64 per cent in 2012. The massive victory gives Mr Putin new confidence to stand up to the west.
The election came amides ca down lating Cold War-like tensions, with accusations that Moscow was behind the nerveagent poisoning this month of a former Russian double agent in Britain and that its internet trolls had waged an extensive campaign to undermine the 2016 US presidential election.
However, the accusations ultimately bolstered Mr Putin’s popularity among a populace that sees him as their defender against a hostile outside world and the embodiment of Russia’s resurgent power on the world stage.
The election was such a foregone conclusion that Mr Putin gave only a perfunctory victory speech and said nothing about what he will do for his country.
“I am a member of your team. We are bound for success,” he told chanting crowds near the Kremlin.
Mr Putin’s electoral power has centred on stability, a quality cherished by Russians after the chaotic break-up of the Soviet Union.
But that stability has been bolstered by a suppression of dissent, the withering of independent media and the top-russian control of politics called “managed democracy”.
In his next six years, the president is likely to assert Russia’s power abroad even more strongly. He recently announced that Russia had developed advanced nuclear weapons capable of evading missile defences and “hypersonic” missiles, in a signal to western countries that they will have to reckon with Moscow’ s renewed military might.
The Russian military campaign that bolsters the Syrian government is clearly aimed at strengthening Moscow’s foothold in the Middle East. Russian leaders are also said to be eagerly eying any reconciliation on the Korean peninsula as an economic opportunity for their country.