The team of liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin announced on Tuesday that it had successfully collected the 100,000 signatures required to advance his candidacy in Russia’s March presidential election to the next stage.
Unprecedented scenes of Russians patiently waiting in line in major cities across Russia over the weekend have boosted Nadezhdin’s profile enormously, with opinion leaders, including politicians Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Maxim Katz voicing their support for the outlier.
By midday Tuesday, Nadezhdin’s candidacy had received 101,607 signatures of support from Russian citizens, though Nadezhdin has told campaign staff to continue collecting signatures until they reach 150,000. Once collected, the signatures must be submitted to the Central Election Committee (CEC) for verification.
“We have already collected 101,000 signatures, but they’re not perfect. We need to submit 105,000 flawless signatures to the CEC that they can’t possibly find fault with, which is why we need to collect as many as possible,” Nadezhdin wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday.
Sources in Nadezhdin’s team confirmed to independent media outlets Meduza and Dozhd that the signatures they currently have are insufficient as many won’t meet the stringent criteria of the CEC, and are likely to be rejected as “defective”.
Nadezhdin has dubbed himself a principled opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose politics he blames for “dragging Russia back to the past”. A staunch critic of the war in Ukraine, Nadezhdin argues in his manifesto that: “Not a single one of its aims has been met, and won’t be without huge damage to the economy and an irreparable blow to Russian demographics.”