Russia: Voters from the Baltic to the Pacific tightened President Vladimir Putin's grip on power yesterday, electing a loyal new Russian parliament that will allow the former KGB spy to push through reforms almost at will.
Initial results showed the pro-Kremlin United Russia party taking a third of votes, with Putin loyalists in the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and Motherland bloc also showing strongly, handing the President a chance to fulfil pledges to streamline the economy, slash crippling bureaucracy, attract foreign capital and fight corruption.
Early counts showed the Communists fighting for second place with the LDPR, leaving them a diminishing voice with which to lambast Mr Putin for allegedly abandoning the poor, in a county where more than 20 per cent of people live below the poverty line and the average monthly wage is $185.
With the main liberal parties, the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) and Yabloko, scrabbling for the 5 per cent needed for automatic entry to parliament, Mr Putin will be less troubled than ever by accusations he is an authoritarian bent on crushing free media and critics like the jailed oil baron Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
For voters used to a constant diet of televisual propaganda for United Russia, yesterday's result was no surprise. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said media coverage was grossly biased in the party's favour, even though its candidates refused to take part in pre-election debates.
"For me Yabloko is the only party that can take on the current rulers," said Ms Natalya Ryzhova (50), outside one Moscow polling station. "But United Russia will win, even though they are going nowhere with the country, and they can't string two words together."
Yesterday's vote offered no solace to Mr Khodorkovsky, who is charged with huge tax evasion and fraud, or to several other jailed shareholders in his Yukos oil company. Russia's richest man voted with fellow inmates in a Moscow jail yesterday.
The attack on Yukos has spooked foreign investors, who feared a tumultuous reversal of the rigged 1990s privatisations that created a coterie of billionaire "oligarchs".
Mr Putin has denied such a possibility, while filling the Kremlin with old colleagues from the security services who loathe tycoons like Mr Khodorkovsky and Chelsea Football Club boss Mr Roman Abramovich, another oil magnate, who rose to power under Boris Yeltsin.
Mr Yeltsin, who anointed Mr Putin as his successor in 1999, suggested yesterday that he had voted for the SPS party of 40-something liberal reformers, centred on West-leaning, media-savvy politicians whom he nurtured during his decade in power.
"The only thing I can say is that I voted for the young ones," he said outside a polling station in Moscow. "They are having a tough time now, but they are the future."
Pensioner Mr Mikhail Dyomkin said SPS was also his choice for the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.
"United Russia are bound to win, I guess, but they are backward-looking, somehow - imagine reintroducing the old anthem," he said, recalling a successful drive from Mr Putin and United Russia to restore the Soviet national anthem to Russia.
Another pensioner, Ms Lidya Arkhipovna, voted for the Motherland bloc, a party analysts believe was formed by the Kremlin to steal seats from the Communists and Yabloko and SPS.
"We all know United Russia will win, but I don't like bureaucrats and officials, always rattling on. And if Putin left they'd be nowhere!"
Many wonder whether the parliament created yesterday will assure that Mr Putin - who is almost certain to win March's presidential poll - stays in power longer than expected.
He is obliged by law to step down in 2008, but with two-thirds backing in the Duma, United Russia could enact changes to the constitution - assuming the rubber-stamp upper house of parliament, pliable regional legislatures and Mr Putin approve.