By Andrew Osborn and Dmitry Solovyov

MOSCOW, Russia, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin won even greater supremacy over Russia’s political system after the ruling United Russia party took three quarters of the seats in parliament in a weekend election, paving the way for him to run for a fourth term as president.

With most votes counted, the party, founded by Putin almost 16 years ago after he first became president, was on track to win 76 percent of the seats in Russia’s Duma, the lower house of parliament, up from just over half in 2011.

That would be its biggest ever majority. Putin’s spokesman called it “an impressive vote of confidence” in the Russian leader and dismissed critics who noted a sharp fall in turnout.

Liberal opposition parties failed to win any seats. Dmitry Gudkov, the only liberal opposition politician to hold a seat before, said he had been beaten by a United Russia candidate.

“The question now is…how to live with a one-party parliament,” Gudkov said.

European election monitors said the vote was marred by numerous procedural irregularities and restrictions on basic rights. Russian officials said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

Near complete results showed turnout was only around 48 percent, down from 60 percent in 2011, suggesting apathy among some Russians – particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg – and a softening of enthusiasm for the ruling elite.

Putin, speaking to United Russia campaign staff a few minutes after polling stations closed on Sunday night, said the win showed voters still trusted the leadership despite an economic slowdown made worse by Western sanctions over Ukraine.

“We can say with certainty that the party has achieved a very good result; it’s won,” Putin said at the United Russia headquarters, where he arrived together with his ally, Dmitry Medvedev, who is prime minister and the party’s leader.

Alluding to the spluttering economy, which is forecast to shrink this year by at least 0.3 percent, Putin said: “We know that life is hard for people, there are lots of problems, lots of unresolved problems. Nevertheless, we have this result.”

Putin’s aides are likely to use the result as a springboard for his own re-election campaign in 2018, though he has not yet confirmed whether he will seek another term.

Members of a local election commission count unused ballots at a polling station following a parliamentary election in Moscow, Russia, September 18, 2016. REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

“OVERWHELMING MAJORITY”

United Russia won 343 seats of the total of 450 in the Duma, the Central Election Commission said, after 93 percent of ballots had been counted.

That is up from 238 seats in the last parliamentary election, in 2011, and is enough to allow United Russia to unilaterally change the constitution, though Putin can run again under the existing one as he was prime minister between his second and third terms.

Other parties trailed far behind.

According to the near complete official vote count, the Communists were on track to come second with 42 seats, the populist LDPR party third with 41, and the left-of-centre Just Russia party fourth with 21 seats. All three tend to vote with United Russia on crunch issues and avoid direct criticism.

Among voting irregularities witnessed by Reuters were several people voting twice in one polling station in the Mordovia region of central Russia. Official results in another area showed a turnout double that recorded on the spot.

After the last election, in 2011, anger at ballot-rigging prompted large protests in Moscow and the Kremlin will be keen to avoid any repeat of that.

Ilkka Kanerva, a Finnish parliamentarian and special coordinator for the elections from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the OSCE had noted some improvements, including greater transparency when it came to administration.

But he said the overall picture was beset by problems. “Legal restrictions on basic rights continue to be a problem. If Russia is to live up to its democratic commitments, greater space is needed for debate and civic engagement,” he said.

TURNOUT DOWN

Election officials said on Monday that turnout was nearly 48 percent, substantially lower than the 60 percent turnout at the last parliamentary election across Russia’s 11 times zones, which stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea.

Commenting on the turnout, Putin, at the United Russia campaign HQ, said it was “not as high as we saw in previous election campaigns, but it is high.”

His spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the “overwhelming majority” of voters had come out for Putin in “an impressive vote of confidence”. It would be wrong to call the turnout low, he said, adding that it was higher than in most European countries.

The return of an old voting system, under which half, rather than all, deputies were drawn from party lists with the other half decided by people voting for individuals, boosted United Russia’s seats. Near final results showed it won 140 seats under the list system and 203 seats from the constituency system.

REFLECTED GLORY

United Russia benefits from its association with 63-year-old Putin, who, after 17 years in power as either president or prime minister, consistently wins an approval rating of around 80 percent in opinion polls.

Most voters do not see any viable alternative to Putin and his allies and they fear a return to the chaos and instability of the 1990s, the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if his rule ends.

Many voters are also persuaded by the Kremlin narrative, frequently repeated on state TV, of the West using sanctions to try to wreck the economy in revenge for Moscow’s seizure of Crimea, the Ukrainian region it annexed in 2014.

Putin has said it is too early to say if he will run in 2018. If he did and won, he would be in power until 2024, longer than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the longest-serving Soviet leader aside from Joseph Stalin.

Liberal opposition politicians, the only group openly critical of Putin, failed to get over the five percent threshold needed for party representation in the Duma, near final results showed. They also failed to break through in constituency races.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov and Polina Devitt in Moscow, Jack Stubbs, Olga Sichkar and Svetlana Burmistrova in Ufa, Andrei Kuzmin in Velikiye Luki, Gleb Stolyarov, Alex Winning and Vladimir Soldatkin in Saransk, Anton Zverev in the Tula Region, Anastasia Teterevleva in the Moscow Region, Maria Tsvetkova, Kira Zavalyova, Denis Pinchuk and Oksana Kobzeva; Writing by Christian Lowe and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Philippa
Fletcher)