98.5% of Chechens support Putin

No surprises, then, about the outcome of yesterday's parliamentary elections in Russia. Vladimir Putin's United Russia party duly won a landslide victory that was never in doubt. Western observers cried foul , and the governments of France and Germany joined the United States in calling for a probe into allegations of election fraud. We'll have to wait until Friday for the official results from the Central Election Commission, but it looks like United Russia will end up with 315 seats in the new Duma after securing 64.1% of the vote. The Communists limped over the finish line with about 11.5%, with the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic party taking 8.2%, which means that Andrei Lugovoi, the alleged murderer of Alexander Litvinenko, now has a seat in the lower house - and the parliamentary immunity from prosecution that goes with it! The only other party to get over the new 7% threshold to ensure representation in the new parliament was A Just Russia (7.8), but nobody believes that grouping is anything but a fake dreamed up by the Kremlin as a decoy for opposition votes.

The real opposition parties fared predictably badly, with the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko getting 1-2% each, a disastrous showing which Putin blithely interpreted as "a sign of trust" in his leadership. Gary Kasparov, the former chess champion and anti-Putinist begged to differ. "There are no illusions that what is being called elections was the most unfair and dirtiest in the whole history of modern Russia," he said.

But am I the only person to be surprised by the low level, as it were, of Putin's landslide? Sixty-four percent, after all, is hardly on a par with the unanimous, almost proverbial votes of confidence that Saddam Hussein used to chalk up in Iraq. I say, if you're going to steal an election, at least do it in style. Take the result in Chechnya, where President Ramzan Kadyrov's private army, or Kadyrovtsy , seems to have delivered a spectacularly fake result. Official figures show that 99.2% of registered voters in the North Caucasus republic that has borne the brunt of Putin's hardline policies, turned out art the polls and - wait for this! - that 99.3% of them cast their ballots for United Russia.

The scale of the landslide is important for plotting Putin's next move because he will need a three quarters majority vote in the Duma if he wants to make changes to the Constitution allowing him to serve a third term. And he also faces a tight schedule if he wants to get such a change through the legal mangle before the presidential election on 2nd March. Not only would the new deputies have to give the Putin Plan the thumbs-up. All 87 of Russia's regional parliaments would have to approve the decision. Bear in mind that the Duma is currently in recess and the holidays in Russia continue until the middle of January, and it's clear that Putin and his supporters will have to move quickly in the following six weeks to get the paperwork done in time.