A would-be Russian presidential candidate with a reputation for opposing the war in Ukraine is poised to garner enough signatures to run against Russian President Vladimir Putin in March — provided that the Kremlin allows his candidacy to proceed.
“We’ve already collected 101,000 signatures,” Russian politician Boris Nadezhdin announced Tuesday, per a Meduza translation. “These signatures are not perfect! We’ll need to submit 105,000 flawless signatures to the Central Election Commission. Ones that can’t be challenged.”
Nadezhdin, the nominee of the Civic Initiative Party, must “collect at least 100,000 voter signatures” to stand as a presidential candidate, per state media, with at least 2,500 each coming from 40 different regions of Russia. The deadline is Jan. 31. He has enjoyed a surge in support in recent days as tens of thousands of Russian citizens seize the opportunity to register their opposition to Putin and the war in Ukraine.
“Nadezdhin’s whole message … is to stop the war, so when people sign their name under his candidacy, that this is the message they support and that’s all they really care about,” said Dr. Sergey Radchenko, a Russian national who now teaches Russian foreign policy history at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s not his economic policies; it’s nothing else. It’s all about stopping the war.”
That makes his recent success on the signature-gathering trail a pleasant surprise for critics of Russian dissidents and Western critics of Putin, even if they deem it an abortive one.
“It is an interesting development, but I would be very surprised if Nadezhdin is eventually allowed to stand for election,” Estonian Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Marko Mickelson told an Estonian outlet. “After all, in Russia, politics as such has essentially ceased to exist, and even more so politics opposed to Putin or the regime.”
The unlikely aspirant, whose highest office in Russian politics to date was a term in parliament at the turn of the century, is a former colleague of murdered Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated near Red Square in 2015.
“I am running for president as a principled opponent of the current president’s policies,” Nadezhdin told the Wall Street Journal last week. “There are dozens of millions of people who already understand that the way of Putin is very bad for the country, for the future of their children and grandchildren.”
Putin and his allies adopted censorship laws in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion that banned “discrediting” the Russian military or other statements of opposition to the war. Those laws have led to thousands of arrests, but Nadezhdin has avoided that kind of crackdown despite opposing the Kremlin line in state media appearances. He has described Putin’s launch of the full-scale invasion as “a big mistake by Putin” and endorsed the opening of peace negotiations to end the conflict.
“Not a single one of the goals of the SVO has been fulfilled,” his website says, using the acronym for “special military operation,” the Kremlin-required euphemism for the war. “And they’re unlikely to be fulfilled without enormous damage to Russia’s economy and an irreparable demographic blow to the country.”
Putin set the date for the March 17 elections in early December, and Nadezhdin began the process of gathering signatures on Dec. 26, per state-run TASS. That effort kicked into high gear in recent days as support from imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s associates helped to galvanize the rallying of dissident public opinion behind his candidacy.
“As there aren’t currently many safe ways to protest, why not take advantage of this method [of protesting] and leave your signature in support of Nadezhdin?” Anti-Corruption Foundation Director Ivan Zhdanov said on Jan. 20. “He’s a politician with a long and ambiguous history, but as for leaving a signature for him, why not? To provide a signature is to give a candidate the right to take part in an election.”
That history includes a long run as one of the pundits allowed to express liberal opinions on “tightly scripted” state media television shows, according to another expatriate Russian scholar.
“He has never been there as a politician. He is not considered by those who watch this as a politician; he is considered as a talking head, as a part of the show,” said Russian economist Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago. “And as a part of the show, people who are scripted to be a part of the show, they could say different things.”
His emergence as a locus of anti-war support might spur the Kremlin to apply stricter rules to his pronouncements.
“He’s kind of out there saying, ‘OK, arrest me. … What are you gonna do about me?’” Radchenko said. “That novelty, that is something that people get excited about and surprised, and that’s why they’re standing in line to sign their name under his nomination papers.”
Still, voter enthusiasm is not the force that shapes the outcome of the election, according to Sonin and Radchenko.
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“They know the results that they are going to report by now,” Sonin said of the Kremlin’s election planners.
Radchenko agreed. “He’s unelectable, obviously, because, first and foremost, because Russia is not a democratic system,” he said. “And there’s no way that Putin will allow a genuine political opponent to get elected. That’s just as simple as that.”