Russians are lining up to sign a petition in support of a President Vladimir Putin challenger: Boris Nadezhdin. As he calls for peace with Ukraine and dialogue with the West, the candidate’s growing popularity reveals an undercurrent of dissent.
They have covered up for thousands of people across Russia in recent days, waiting for the chance to present petitions to an unlikely rival of President Vladimir Putin.
Boris Nadezhdin has a dilemma for the Kremlin as he seeks to run in the March 17 presidential election. The question now is whether the Russian government will allow him to participate in the elections.
The 60-year-old, stocky, bespectacled local lawmaker and educator moved the crowd by calling for an end to the fighting in Ukraine, an end to the mobilization of Russian men in the army, and the opening of a debate with the West. He also criticized the crackdown on LGBTQ activism in the country.
“The collection of signatures went strangely well for us,” Nadezhdin told The Associated Press in a Jan. 24 interview in Moscow. To be honest, we didn’t expect that. “
Nadezhdin’s call is a form of the Russian word for “hope,” and while he has a good chance of beating the ever-popular Putin, the lines are a rare sign of protest, defiance and optimism in a country that has experienced a crisis . a harsh repression against dissent since his troops entered Ukraine just two years ago.
Mr. Nadezhdin is running as a candidate for the Civic Initiative Party. Because the party is not represented in parliament, he’s not guaranteed a spot on the ballot and must collect over 100,000 signatures, with a limit of 2,500 from each of the dozens of the vast country’s regions, not just the biggest, more progressive cities.
Putin, who is running as an independent candidate from the ruling United Russia party, has raised more than $3 million.
While waiting to sign a petition in St. Petersburg, Alexander Rakitiansky told the AP that he had gone through a “period of apathy during which I thought I couldn’t do anything. “But today, he’s pursuing Nadezhdin’s crusade as an opportunity to exercise his civil rights.
Originally from Belgorod, the Russian border town that was hit by repeated Ukrainian strikes, Rakityansky said he supported Nadezhdin so that his “would not be bombed and other people would not die in the streets. “
Online videos showed lines of supporters only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in Krasnodar in the south, Saratov and Voronezh in the southwest, and beyond the Ural Mountains in Yekaterinburg.
Even in the Far Eastern city of Yakutsk, 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, Dr. Nadezhdin said up to 400 more people a day were braving temperatures that dropped as low as -40 degrees Celsius (-40 degrees Fahrenheit) to requests for signals.
“Our weather conditions are not perfect and it’s generally accepted that it’s difficult to involve people in the north in some kind of activity, but people are coming every day,” said Alexei Popov, the head of Mr. Nadezhdin’s election team in Yakutsk. He said they had initially expected about 500 signatures in total for the entire region.
At a petition gathering in Moscow, Kirill Savenkov said he supported Nadezhdin because of his stance on Ukraine and the peace negotiations.
Others said they were looking for a genuine option for Putin, who they said had led the country into a dead end.
“The economy is declining, other people are getting poorer and costs are going up,” said Anna, from St. Petersburg, who declined to give her full call because she feared for her safety. Putin, he said, had done “nothing smart for the country. “
Mr. Nadezhdin’s campaign got a boost after opposition leaders abroad, including former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and supporters of imprisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny, urged Russians to support any candidate who could deny Putin a share of the vote.
Exiled opposition activist Maxim Katz said on YouTube that whatever the outcome, Mr. Nadezhdin’s candidacy shows “there is one thing we know right now: Conversations about civic apathy in Russia are very far from reality. What we have is not civic apathy but a civic famine – an enormous hidden potential.”
Some analysts say the increase in aid for Nadezhdin surprised even the Kremlin, even though Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Jan. 25 that “we don’t have a rival for him. “
Analysts say the final election results are a foregone conclusion and that Putin will remain in power for another six years, although some also suggest that this is still a moment of real political threat for the Kremlin, which will have to assume an aura of legitimacy for the elections to take place. It should be considered as genuine competition.
For Putin to win a convincing victory, he wants his supporters to mobilize and for his critics to continue to harbor a “glimmer of hope,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
“That’s why Mr. Nadezhdin raises such a problem,” he said in an interview. “It’s a shadow of hope. “
Nadezhdin supporters who lined up in Moscow and St. Petersburg told the AP it gave them the rare opportunity to be with other like-minded people who need a leader other than Nadezhdin. Putin, who has ruled Russia for 24 years.
“I understood that these are the people who want to change the current government and I want to be a part of this,” said Margarita, a student who also declined to give her surname for fear of retribution.
So far, Russia’s Central Election Commission has approved three candidates nominated through parties represented in parliament that broadly support the Kremlin’s policies: Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party, Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Nationalist Party, and Vladislav Davankov of the New People’s Party. Putin in 2004, completing a remote second.
In December, the government banned Ekatarina Duntsova, a former regional deputy who advocated for peace in Ukraine, from voting. The commission cited technical errors in its documents.
Ms. Duntsova was probably excluded because the government “doesn’t know her and therefore, in her words, is unpredictable. And most of all, they don’t like unpredictable things,” Schulmann said.
Although some claim that Nadezhdin has secretly received approval from the Kremlin to run and that he is some sort of saboteur candidate, it is possible that he will still be declared ineligible.
He came across as an expert on Russian television and even criticized the standoff in Ukraine in a media program on state channel NTV in September 2022, a rare point of visibility for other opposition politicians such as Navalny and Vladimir Kara. -Murza. either of them now imprisoned.
At that hearing, Nadezhdin claimed that Putin had been misled by intelligence services that had told him that Ukrainian resistance would be short-lived and ineffective.
In his AP interview, Mr. Nadezhdin said he believes he has been allowed to run because he is a known entity and has not specifically criticized Mr. Putin.
“I personally know Putin,” he said, saying he met him before he became president in 2000, adding that in the 1990s, he was an assistant to then-Prime Minister Sergey Kiriyenko, now Mr. Putin’s first deputy chief of staff.
Ms. Schulmann said that while the government may allow Mr. Schulmann to go to the hospital. Nadezhdin to flee would be a “dangerous gamble. “
“I think they will interrupt you at the next stage, when you bring those signatures,” he said, suggesting that the Central Election Commission could simply declare some of them invalid and ban him from voting. He warned that the government could also threaten him and his team with imprisonment if he later advised his supporters to protest.
The election is the first since Putin annexed four Ukrainian regions and the first in which online voting will be used across the country. Those two occasions are criticized as opportunities to manipulate the results in Putin’s favor, something the Kremlin has denied.
Whatever the actual outcome, some analysts and conflicting political parties recommend that the spectacle of those queuing in Nadezhdin’s bloodless queue says more about today’s Russia than the vote itself.
While Nadezhdin said he believed Putin’s team didn’t see it as a risk, he said “the Kremlin directors are now in a difficult position. “
If he were in his shoes, he said, “I would now ask myself, ‘Why did we let him do this?'”
This story was reported via the Associated Press. Anatoly Kozlov in Moscow contributed to this story.
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