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Opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin (January 2024)

Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko / dpa

The Central Election Commission of Russia did not allow Boris Nadezhdin to run for president. This was announced by the chairwoman of the Russian election commission, Ella Pamfilova, on Thursday morning in Moscow.

The official reason she gave was formal errors in the candidate's signature documents. A few days ago, Nadezhdin submitted a good 105,000 signatures and had collected twice as many. People lined up outside his offices across Russia to vote for him as a candidate.

The electoral authority's working group, which had previously examined Nadezhdin's documents, had previously stated that it had found errors in a good 15 percent of the signature documents submitted. Up to five percent is allowed by law.

The deputy head of the electoral authority, Nikolai Bulayev, said that 60,000 of the 104,734 signatures were checked for 144 hours. Among the signatures are eleven from the dead. 9,147 invalid and 95,587 valid signatures were submitted. Nadezhdin was still able to “defend” 62 of the 9,147 signatures that were declared invalid; they were still recognized. Nadezhdin said he had collected more than 200,000 signatures.

Nadezhdin and his staff do not agree with this assessment and published some of the alleged errors: For example, the address of a supporter in Rostov-on-Don at the electoral authority became “Rostov-on-Dom”. In another, Mayakovsky Street was suddenly called “Myakovsky Street” and the city of Salekhard was “Salichard.”

Boris Nadezhdin represents liberal positions and has repeatedly spoken out publicly against the continuation of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine - even on state television. "We have to elect a different leadership of the country who will put an end to this story with Ukraine," he recently said in a talk show about the war of invasion against Kiev. It was therefore expected that the 60-year-old would not be registered as a candidate.

Vladimir Putin wants to be confirmed in office again in the presidential election in mid-March. This has little to do with an election; the politicians who have already been admitted are all loyal to the Kremlin and are therefore counted as candidates.

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