As of: February 5, 2024, 12:29 p.m
By: Bettina Menzel
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We have no chance, so we use it.
The motto of the opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin might be something similar.
He can't win the election in Russia, but he still wants to run.
Update from February 5th, 12:26 p.m.:
Russia's Central Election Commission has, according to the opposition leader Boris Nadezhdin, withdrawn 15 percent of his supporters' signatures as incorrect.
“We plan to get these signatures back,” the liberal politician wrote on his Telegram channel.
In order to be registered, Nadezhdin, who has criticized Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine as wrong, would have to have around 4,500 of the 9,209 disputed signatures recognized again, according to his own statements.
Nadezhdin, who wants to run for the Citizens' Initiative party, is the only presidential candidate who is openly against the Ukraine war that Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin has been waging against Ukraine for almost two years.
The opposition politician received unexpectedly great support from many compatriots for his anti-war stance.
However, political observers gave Nadezhdin's candidacy little chance.
They assume that the electoral commission will take the old liberal out of the race under some pretext.
Incumbent Vladimir Putin wants to be re-elected for the fifth time in the presidential election in March - and had the Russian constitution rewritten specifically for this purpose in 2020.
The Kremlin does not need a large audience for an explicit opponent of its war of aggression.
Kremlin critic wants to challenge Putin in Russia election
First report from January 31st:
Moscow – Boris Nadezhdin would be the only opposition candidate in the presidential elections in Russia in March.
The Kremlin critic collected the necessary 105,000 signatures to run as a candidate.
He announced this in a press conference on Wednesday.
But the election authority's response is still pending.
The 60-year-old has no hopes of winning in Russia's manipulated system anyway.
Nadezhdin as a candidate in the presidential elections in Russia?
“Thank you to everyone who believed in us”
He is an oppositionist through and through.
Nadezhdin was one of the few people in Russia who recently took the liberty of publicly criticizing the war in Ukraine.
Others who made similar statements are in exile – or in prison.
The 60-year-old has been in politics for three decades, most of that time as a city councilor in a Moscow suburb.
Nadezhdin is also an old hand at Russian presidential elections, at least behind the scenes.
He was already involved in Boris Yeltsin's campaigns.
When Vladimir Putin began his first term in office as Yeltsin's successor, Boris Nadezhdin was still in close contact with the Kremlin leader.
But he gradually distanced himself and soon became a sharp critic of the Kremlin.
Boris Nadezhdin wants to run as a candidate in the presidential elections in Russia (picture from January 31, 2024).
© Imago/Maksim Blinov/SNA
In recent weeks, people in various regions of Russia have stood in long lines to support Nadezhdin with their signature.
Now the opposing candidate collected enough votes to run in the presidential election.
“Thank you to everyone who believed in us,” the politician told the press on Wednesday.
In the end, he said, there were twice as many signatures as actually required.
On the politician's homepage on Wednesday evening
(as of January 31st, 10:20 p.m.)
there were 200,924 signatories.
But his approval is not certain.
Within the next ten days, the election commission will decide whether to allow Nadezhdin to run.
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How the electoral authority could prevent Nadezhdin's approval
The election commission is unlikely to approve Nadezhdin's candidacy, political analyst Fedor Karscheninnikov recently speculated to the independent Russian media
Meduza
.
Putin didn't fire Nadezhdin immediately because he initially appeared to be "completely hopeless," analyst Karscheninnikov wrote on Telegram.
But given all the excitement, the expert is “85 percent sure” that the Kremlin will not allow the opposition to run.
“No matter how many signatures there are.”
A source close to the Kremlin confirmed something similar to the medium
Meduza
.
There will be no anti-war candidate in this year's presidential election, it said.
It would not be the first time that an opposition member has been barred from running for office: in the last elections six years ago, the electoral commission banned Alexei Navalny from running.
Today the Kremlin critic is in prison, but from there he called for support for Nadezhdin.
At the end of December, the authority also denied the candidacy of the opposition member Yekaterina Duntsova because the signatures she had collected allegedly had too many errors.
Nadezhdin has no hope of victory, but “at least the beginning of the end of the Putin era”
Even if he actually runs against Putin as an opponent, Nadezhdin has no illusions about the outcome of the election in March.
But he hopes that March 17 will herald “at least the beginning of the end” of the Putin era, the 60-year-old said in an interview with the AFP news agency.
The Kremlin itself is confident of victory: “We don’t see it as a competitor,” said the Russian President’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, recently in a disparaging tone.
That's simply put in a system rigged in Putin's favor.
Even Russia's Central Election Commission pointed out suspected manipulation in the 2018 elections and presented images from surveillance cameras as evidence.
You can see election workers stuffing several ballot papers into an urn.
The independent election observation organization Golos counted 2,700 attempts at manipulation on election evening.
The 2024 Russian presidential election is already being accompanied by allegations of fraud and manipulation.
Putin wants to secure his fifth term in office.
Thanks to a historic constitutional reform passed in 2021, the Kremlin leader could remain president until 2036.