Opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin has submitted 105,000 signatures to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) for his participation in the Russian presidential elections in March. His campaign team reported this on Wednesday Telegram. That is 5,000 signatures more than the minimum number to participate in the election race.
Nadezhdin presents himself as an anti-war candidate who wants peace negotiations with Ukraine. He was given a month to gather enough support. The committee registered Putin as a presidential candidate on Sunday, with 314,909 signatures.
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It is not yet a given that Nadezhdin has been selected as a presidential candidate. The electoral commission still has to approve the signatures. This committee is responsible for the conduct of the Russian elections and will decide on its participation within ten days.
Shame
The presidential election is widely seen as a sham. Putin has won every presidential election he has contested since the turn of the century, often accompanied by strong evidence of voter fraud. Russia’s best-known opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, has often indicated that he wants to compete against Putin in the presidential elections. Since 2021, Navalny has been serving a prison sentence of more than thirty years in a Russian penal colony. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with the New York Times in 2023 that the Russian election campaign is “not really democracy”, but rather “expensive bureaucracy”.
However, this year several candidates are running for office who are critical of the war in Ukraine. Previously, television journalist Ekaterina Doentsova, who also spoke out against the war, did not collect enough signatures in December. Nadezhdin’s popularity is rather a signal from the Russian population that support for Putin’s war is losing momentum.