Putin's challenger Boris Nadezhdin excluded from Russian elections

Russia's election commission has rejected anti-war challenger Boris Nadezhdin as a candidate in next month's presidential vote.

Mr. Nadezhdin has been relatively critical of President Vladimir Putin's all-out war in Ukraine, with little recognition of opposition within Russia.

Election authorities claimed that more than 15% of the signatures he submitted with his candidacy application were incomplete.

He tried to contest this, but the commission rejected his bid.

Nadezhdin, 60, did not give up and said on social media that he would challenge the Russian Supreme Court's ruling.

The Central Election Commission said more than 9,000 of the 105,000 signatures submitted by Nadejdin were invalid and contained various violations.

That leaves 95,587 names, just short of the 100,000 signatures needed to register as a candidate, said committee member Andrei Shutov.

“There are tens of millions of people here who were going to vote for me,” Nadejdin told the commission. “According to all opinion polls, I'm in second place after President Putin.”

“The decision has been taken,” declared Commission Chair Ella Pamfilova. “If you want, you can go to court,” Nadejdin said, TASS news agency quoted him as saying.

Russia's presidential election is scheduled to be held March 15-17, but there is no doubt about the outcome as only candidates deemed acceptable by the Kremlin are running.

A final decision on who can take part in the election is expected to be made on Saturday, but the election commission chief said it is already clear there will be four candidates on the ballot.

In addition to Vladimir Putin, the list also includes nationalist leader Leonid Slutsky, deputy speaker of parliament Vladislav Davankov, and communist Nikolai Kharitonov. All parties broadly support the Kremlin's policies, and none of the three parties is seen as a real challenger.

“Running for president in 2024 is the most important political decision of my life. I will not back down from my intentions,” Nadezhdin wrote on Telegram. “I collected over 200,000 signatures across Russia. We did this signature gathering openly and honestly.”

Boris Nadezhdin is one of the few government critics who has spoken out on state TV's ubiquitous talk shows since the February 24, 2022 invasion. He has appeared as a sort of anti-war “whipping boy” like the other guests. subject of criticism.

In the 1990s, he was an adviser to Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated by jumping from the Kremlin in 2015, and he also has ties to Sergei Kiriyenko, a key political supervisor of Putin.

Nadezhdin's presidential bid was initially viewed with suspicion by some opposition figures, but Russia's main opposition leader Alexei Navalny supported Nadezhdin's campaign from a prison in the Arctic Circle. So did ousted former businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Appearing on the BBC last month, Nadezhdin promised to end the war in Ukraine on his first day in office, but was realistic about the chances of success.

“My first task is to stop the conflict with Ukraine and then restore normal relations between Russia and Western society.”

He is not the first presidential candidate to run on an anti-war platform. In December, former television journalist and independent politician Ekaterina Duntsova was barred from running as a candidate after her electoral commission claimed there were errors in her application.

Nadezhdin said she met with the wives of reservists who wanted their husbands to return from the war, riding a wave of anti-war sentiment in Russia. His campaign started slowly, and it was only in recent weeks that Russians began to show their support in large numbers.

His growing success also drew condemnation from pro-Kremlin propagandists such as Vladimir Solovyov, who suggested that he was an agent of the “Ukrainian Nazis.”