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by Tiziana Di Giovannandrea 08 September 2019The seats have also closed in the westernmost region of the country. Local consultations ended along all the numerous time zones of Russia. The last polling stations that closed were those in the westernmost region of the country, Kaliningrad at 20:00 local time.

After the wave of protests and the consequent harsh repression, with the arrests of opponents, which took place during the summer, over 5 thousand local elections were held on Sunday throughout the Russian Federation to elect 16 governors, the deputies from 13 regions, including the Crimea and the 45 seats of the Duma in Moscow. This is why all the attention is focused on the capital where 200 candidates for Parliament, with only one independent candidate. In total, voting took place in over 48,000 polling stations.

The preliminary results of the vote are already known for almost all of the territory of the Russian Federation where United Russia , the party in power, reaffirmed its leadership but the great unknown regards the vote in Moscow, where, after the closure of the seats, not neither polls nor any preliminary results were released.

The average turnout in the elections for local government bodies at 6.00 pm was 33.75%. The figure was released by the president of the Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation, Ella Pamfilova.

According to Maxim Grigoryev, deputy director of the working group of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, which monitors the implementation of citizens' voting rights: "The elections took place more or less calmly everywhere, the number of reports of violations is almost equal to that of other years ".

From the headquarters of the opposition opponent Aleksey Navalny , extraparliamentary opponents have already announced that United Russia, according to their data, would lose the majority over Moscow. "If miracles don't start," said Leonid Volkov, Navalny's right-hand man. For now, the exit polls have not yet arrived, which have jumped on Moscow. The popularity of the United Russia party is at its lowest level in more than a decade, so the recently concluded elections are a test for Vladimir Putin to measure the resilience of his party.

The protests erupted in mid-July after the Central Electoral Commission refused to register a large number of independent candidates without a party, because they would not have collected enough signatures from real supporters, thus invalidating their candidacy. A Commission decision that President Vladimir Putin approved on Sunday after voting.

The excluded, including Alexei Navalny's allies, denounced the move as a ploy designed to prevent them from obtaining seats in the Moscow parliament.