Pro-Putin parties score victory in polls

Putin's United Russia led with 36.8 percent of the vote after 90.58 percent of the ballots had been counted, the head of the central electoral commission, Alexander Veshnyakov, told a televised press conference.

They were followed by the opposition Communist Party with 12.7 percent.

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In third place stood the Liberal Democratic Party of nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky -- a strong supporter of Putin -- with 11.8 percent, while another pro-Kremlin bloc -- Rodina -- stood in fourth with nine percent.

This meant that pro-Kremlin parties had about 60 percent of the vote in Sunday's elections, according to the party lists that decide half the seats in the 450-seat State Duma, the lower house.

"We can congratulate these parties on making it into the Duma," said Veshnyakov.

The other half is decided in single-mandate elections, leaving Putin with an opportunity to clinch a two-thirds majority that would allow him to alter the constitution and perhaps run for a third presidential term in 2008.

The president is limited to two terms under the current constitution.

The state-run Channel One television said that according to forecasts, United Russia alone would get 223 seats in the new parliament. The pro-Kremlin forces would need 301 seats for a constitutional majority.

Moreover both of Russia's liberal opposition parties failed to make it into the Duma.

The Yabloko group of Grigory Yavlinsky had 4.3 percent -- short of the five percent needed to automatically win Duma seats. "It's unlikely that anything will change for this party," Veshnyakov said.

The Union of Right Forces (SPS), which held 31 seats in the outgoing Duma compared to Yabloko's 17, fared even worse, with 3.9 percent of the vote.

The Agrarians, allies of the Communists, were in seventh place with 3.8 percent of votes.

Meanwhile, international observers said yesterday that weekend parliamentary elections in Russia failed to meet many democratic criteria and called into question Moscow's commitment to Western standards of democracy.

"The elections failed to meet many OSCE commitments and to the Council of Europe and other international standards," Bruce George, a top official from the pan-European OSCE rights and democracy body, told reporters.

"It's the shared and unanimous view that these deficiencies called into question Russia's willingness to move towards European and international standards for democratic elections," he added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's party and its allies triumphed in the parliamentary elections that crushed the Communists and shut liberal parties out of the chamber for the first time in the post-Soviet era.