Russia, anti-Putin pacifist candidate Nadezhdin excluded from elections: “Serious error in collecting signatures”
There Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) refused to admit to the March presidential elections the only candidate openly opposed to the continuation of the war in Ukraine, Boris Nadezhdinon which much of the opposition was banking.
The Cec has invalidated more than 9,000 signatures in support: in total, the Cec verified 60,000 and to be admitted to the electoral competition the share of irregular signatures must not exceed 5%.
Nadezhdin aspired to challenge the “eternal” president Vladimir Putin, who will run again this time to secure a fifth mandate (for six years) without any real challengers at the polls. In 2020, the Kremlin leader promoted controversial constitutional amendments to restore presidential term limitspaving the way for him to remain in power until at least 2036.
After invading Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has tightened its already severe laws against public dissent and threw dozens of people in prison for speaking out against what he called a “special military operation”.
On the ballot in the elections scheduled for March 15 to 17, there will be only three other names besides Putinall coming from “front” opposition parties and de facto supported by the Kremlin.
Nadezhdin he criticized the CEC's decision – however widely expected – and announced that he will challenge it before the Supreme Court, in a move that promises to be hopeless. The politician, once close to Yeltsin's former deputy prime minister and then Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, promised to continue his campaign against Putin, at a time when the most important opposition figures are either in prison or in exile. “Sooner or later I will become president of the Russian Federation,” he said at a press conference.
Nadezhdin's candidacy, with his calls to stop Russia's military offensive against Ukraine, brought crowds of Russians to his election offices queuing to leave the signatures needed to submit his candidacy. The Russian opposition, usually very fragmented – from the Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny to exiled former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in prison – had made calls to support Nadezhdin, as “the only way left to legally protest against the Kremlin”.
His exploit was an “unpleasant surprise” for the Kremlin, writes the independent site Meduza. A source close to the Kremlin admitted that Nadezhdin's campaign “it transformed from a niche story into a mass story” and the presidency underestimated the number of Russians capable of “actively speaking” against the war. The risk was that Nadezhdin's consensus, closer to the vote and then at the polls, could exceed the psychological threshold of 10%, exceeding that of the presidential candidates coming from the parties sitting in Parliament.
“It would have become too clear that the parties in the Duma do not represent the electorate” and there was also the risk that that part of society that, despite being in favor of Putin, wants an end to the war would have voted for Nadezhdin. According to the plans of the presidential administration – the hub of power in Russia – in next month's elections, Putin must garner more than 80% of the votesbreaking every record.
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