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Thousands of people have lined up across Russia in recent days, despite freezing cold, for the chance to sign petitions Support the President’s Unexpected Opponent Vladimir Putin,
boris nadezhdin This has become a dilemma for the Kremlin as it seeks to take part in the presidential elections to be held on March 17. The question now is whether Russian authorities will allow him to appear on the ballot instead Decision taken with other candidates.
The burly, bespectacled 60-year-old local lawmaker and academic has impressed the public by openly calling for an end to the conflict in Ukraine, an end to the mobilization of Russian men for the army and dialogue with the West. He has also criticized the country’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ activism.
“The collection of signatures has been unexpectedly good for us,” Nadezhdin told the agency. AP In an interview in Moscow. “To be honest, we didn’t expect this.”
The name “Nadezhdin” is a form of the Russian word “Hope” and although his chances of defeating the still popular Putin are very low, Rank one abnormal signs A sense of protest, defiance and optimism in a country that has faced a harsh crackdown on dissent since its troops entered Ukraine nearly two years ago.
Nadezhdin is running as a candidate for the Civic Initiative Party. Because the party is not represented in Parliament, it is not guaranteed a place on the ballot and must collect more than 100,000 signatures, limited to 2,500 from each, not just from the largest cities but from dozens of regions across the vast country. Great and progressive.
Putin, who is running as an independent candidate rather than a candidate from the ruling United Russia party, has collected more than 3 million.
While waiting to sign a petition in St. Petersburg, Alexander Rakityansky told AP he went through a “The period of apathy when I felt I could do nothing”, However, he now sees Nadezhdin’s campaign as an opportunity to exercise his civil rights.
Rakityansky, originally from Belgorod, a Russian border city hit by repeated Ukrainian attacks, said he supported Nadezhdin so that his hometown “wouldn’t be bombed and people wouldn’t die on the streets.”
Videos on the Internet showed queues of people supporting him not only in Moscow and St Petersburg but also in Krasnodar in the south, Saratov and Voronezh in the south-west and Yekaterinburg beyond the Ural Mountains.
Even in the far eastern city of Yakutsk, 450 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, Nadezhdin’s team said 400 people braved temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius every day to sign petitions.
,Our climatic conditions are not perfect and it is generally accepted that it is difficult to get people from the North involved in any kind of activity, but people come every day”said Alexey Popov, head of Nadezhdin’s election team in Yakutsk. He said they were initially expecting about 500 signatures total for the entire area.
At a signature collection site in Moscow, Kirill Savenkov, 48, said he supported Nadezhdin because of his stance on Ukraine and peace talks.
Others said they wanted real option Putin, who suggested he had driven the country into an impasse.
,The economy is literally declining, people are getting poorer and prices are rising”said Anna, 21, of St. Petersburg, who declined to give her full name because she feared for her safety. Putin, he said, “hasn’t done anything good for the country.”
Nadezhdin’s campaign got a boost when opposition leaders abroad, including supporters of former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny, urged Russians to support any candidate who could bring Putin a share of the vote. May refuse to share.
Exiled opposition activist Maxim Katz said on YouTube that whatever the outcome, Nadezhdin’s candidacy shows that “right now we know one thing: talk of civic apathy in Russia is far from reality. “What we have is not civic apathy, but civic famine, enormous latent potential.”
Some analysts say the surge in support for Nadezhdin has surprised even the Kremlin, although Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that “We don’t consider them rivals.”
Analysts say the election result is a foregone conclusion and Putin will remain in power for the next six years, but some also suggest this is still a moment of real political risk for the Kremlin, which needs an aura of legitimacy for the election. Will have to be presented. As a real controversy.
To give Putin a convincing victory, he needs his supporters to go to the polls and his critics to stay home without “a glimmer of hope,” said Ekaterina Shulman, a political scientist and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Foundation’s Carnegie Russia Eurasia. Global affairs think tank, Center for International Peace, Berlin.
“This is why Nadezhdin is such a big problem”Shulman added in an interview. “It gives a ray of hope.”
Nadezhdin supporters standing in line in Moscow and St. Petersburg told AP That gave him a rare opportunity to be with like-minded people who want a leader other than 71-year-old Putin, who has ruled Russia for 24 years.
“I understood that these are people who want to change the current government and I want to be a part of it,” said student Margarita, 28. Margarita did not even reveal her full name for fear of reprisals.
So far, Russia’s Central Election Commission has approved three candidates Nominated by parties represented in parliament that largely support Kremlin policies: Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party; Leonid Slutsky of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party; and Vladislav Davankov from the New People’s Party. Kharitonov ran against Putin in 2004 and finished second.
In December, authorities excluded the candidacy of Yekaterina Duntsova, a former regional legislator who called for peace in Ukraine. The commission cited technical errors in its documentation.
Duntsova was possibly excluded because officials “don’t know her, so from their point of view she is unpredictable.” And most of all, they dislike the unexpected,” Shulman said.
However there have been claims that Nadezhdin secretly has Kremlin approval to contest the election and is seen as an unlikely candidate to win, leading to her being disqualified.
He has appeared as an expert on Russian television and even criticized the conflict in Ukraine during a talk show on state network NTV in September 2022, an unusual level of visibility given Navalny and other opposition figures such as Vladimir Kara. Not enjoyed by politicians. Murza, both are now imprisoned.
In that appearance, Nadezhdin said that Putin had been misled by intelligence services who had apparently told him that Ukrainian resistance would be short-lived and ineffective.
In his interview with the AP, Nadezhdin said he believed he was allowed to run because he is a well-known institution and has not specifically criticized Putin.
“I know Putin personally,” he said, adding that he met him before he became president in 2000. He said that in the 1990s he was an aide to then-Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, now deputy head of Putin’s presidential cabinet. Putin.
Shulman said that although officials may allow Nadezhdin to come forward, it is a “Dangerous Bet.”
“I think they will remove him in the next phase, when he brings those signatures,” he said, hinting that the Central Election Commission could declare some of them invalid and exclude them from the ballot, and Authorities may also threaten him and his team with jail if he urges his followers to protest.
This is the first election since Putin seized four regions of Ukraine and the first to use internet voting nationwide. Critics suggest there are opportunities to manipulate the results in Putin’s favor, something the Kremlin has refused to do.
Regardless of the actual result, some analysts and political opponents said the sight of people standing in line in the cold for Nadezhdin said more about today’s Russia than the vote itself.
Although Nadezhdin believes Putin’s team did not initially perceive it as a risk, he added that “in the Kremlin they are now in a difficult position.”
He further said, if I were in his place, “Now they might be thinking: ‘Why should we let him do this?'”
(AP)
