EPAPolitician Boris Nadezhdin stands in front of the boxes with signatures
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 13:58
Russian politician Boris Nadezhdin has submitted 105,000 signatures to the electoral commission. With this he would have collected enough signatures to participate in the March presidential elections. The electoral commission will verify the signatures in the coming weeks.
Thousands of people lined up across the country last week to show their support for the Liberal politician. In a message on his Telegram channel, Nadezhdin thanked the people who braved the cold to support him. “We are here because you came to sign.” The Central Election Commission and the current government are now finding it difficult to ignore him, he writes.
In order to participate in the presidential elections on March 17, Nadezhdin had to collect 100,000 signatures from across the country by today. No more than 2,500 signatures were allowed per region, meaning Nadezhdin had to gain enough support in at least forty regions.
Many Russians abroad also signed for the opposition candidate. His team has already announced that it is grateful for the support of Russians worldwide, but that it will not submit signatures from abroad to the electoral commission. These are valid according to the rules of the electoral commission, but Nadezhdin and his team want to do everything they can to ensure that the signatures are not rejected.
Open criticism of war
Nadezhdin is the only potential candidate who openly criticizes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For example, he calls for an end to the war. If he becomes president, he promises, the fighting will stop and peace negotiations will begin. He also wants to release political prisoners.
The thousands of people who lined up to support Nadezhdin’s candidacy also made it clear that they supported his views. By showing their support for Nadezhdin, they could legally show that they are against the war in Ukraine.
EPAThousands of people lined up across Russia to support Nadezhdin’s candidacy
Nearly 20,000 people have been arrested for anti-war protests since the invasion of Ukraine, according to figures from Russian human rights organization OVD info.
Last month, the electoral commission excluded another candidate who openly spoke out against Putin’s policies and the war in Ukraine. According to the election commission, there were errors in her application to register as a candidate. Nadezhdin was admitted, after which Doentsova called on her supporters to support him.
“To be honest, I thought I would suffer the same fate as Doentsova: that they would simply not allow us to collect signatures,” Nadezhdin told the Russian independent news outlet. Medusa.
Russia correspondent Geert Groot Koerkamp:
“Boris Nadezhdin is the only candidate for whom people sometimes queued for hours to support him, a unique event in Russia and in fact the highlight of his entire campaign. He is also the only one who came to hand in the collected signatures under massive media interest the Central Election Commission.
No one knows whether he will be allowed to advance to the final phase of the presidential race, it is fifty-fifty. The Kremlin will be unpleasantly surprised by the public support he has received so far and reluctant to let him through. Not because he would have any chance of winning, but because he will remain a voice for the Russians who are against Kremlin politics for weeks to come.
The alternative is to let him through and ensure that Nadezhdin only gets a handful of votes in March, demonstrating that critics in Russia are a negligible minority.”
Nadezhdin is not the only candidate who wants to take on President Putin. Various candidates from other parties are also participating in the elections. Besides Putin, three of them have been officially admitted as candidates: Leonid Slutsky, Nikolya Charitonov and Vladislav Davankov. They represent various parliamentary parties that often vote with the Kremlin United Russia party.
Nadezhdin is participating on behalf of the Citizens’ Initiative party, a small liberal opposition party that is not in parliament. The Central Electoral Commission has ten days to make a decision on Nadezhdin’s participation in the presidential elections.
2024-01-31 12:58:40
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