Opposed to the war in Ukraine, Boris Nadezhdine has formalized his candidacy for the presidential election in Russia which will be held in March, after having surprisingly managed to collect 100,000 signatures.
Little known to the general public, Boris Nadejdine, nominated by the Civil Initiative party, has formalized his candidacy for the next presidential election in Russia. “Thank you very much to those who believed in us,” said the 61-year-old who gathered the 100,000 signatures needed to register his candidacy despite a short deadline that began in the middle of the holidays. The Electoral Commission, responsible for sifting through sponsorships, must rule on the validity of his candidacy within the next ten days, specifies franceinfo. With his ideas diametrically opposed to those of the head of the Kremlin, particularly on the subject of the war in Ukraine, Boris Nadezhdine is on the verge of becoming the only opponent of Vladimir Putin for the electoral deadline which will take place from March 15 to 17, 2024.
A physicist by training, he has been interested in the politics of his country since he was 17, tells Le Parisien. Since then, after a stint in the Municipal Council of Dolgoprudny, a region of the city of Moscow, he became an advisor to Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in 2015, before finally being elected to the Duma (lower house of the Russian parliament) in 1999. As a deputy, Boris Nadejdine became known for having defended bills in favor of transparency on the income and assets of civil servants or for the law which obliges each polling station during an election or a referendum to publish its results on the Internet.
In his program, in addition to his opposition to Russian military intervention in Ukraine, the Uzbek of origin surprises by tackling social subjects such as abortion or pollution in a very conservative country. If others have been imprisoned for having made similar remarks, Boris Nadezhdine is rather spared for the moment, perhaps Vladimir Putin “does not consider [him] as a terrible threat”, he declared according to Le Parisian, without denying having received threats on his social networks in an interview with franceinfo. His chances of beating the outgoing Russian president remain slim. The opponent hopes for a “count of votes [which] is more or less fair” and wishes to achieve a good score which could mean “the beginning of the end” of the era of the Russian president.
