An unlikely political rival for Vladimir Putin creates a dilemma for the Kremlin

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Thousands of people have lined up across Russia in recent days despite the bitter cold for the chance to sign petitions to support an unexpected rival to President Vladimir Putin.

Boris Nadezhdin has become a dilemma for the Kremlin as he seeks to run in the March 17 presidential election. The question now is whether the Russian authorities will allow him to be on the ballot, unlike the decision made with other candidates.

The stocky, bespectacled 60-year-old local lawmaker and academic has resonated with the public by openly calling for an end to the conflict in Ukraine, an end to the mobilization of Russian men for the army and a dialogue with the West. He has also criticized the country’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ activism.

“The collection of signatures has gone unexpectedly well for us,” Nadezhdin told the AP agency in an interview in Moscow. “We weren’t expecting this, to be honest.”

The name “Nadezhdin” is a form of the Russian word “hope,” and although it is highly unlikely that he will defeat the still popular Putin, the lines are a rare sign of protest, defiance and optimism in a country that has suffered harsh repression against dissent since its troops entered Ukraine almost two years ago.

Nadezhdin is running as a candidate for the Civic Initiative Party. Since the party is not represented in Parliament, it is not guaranteed a place on the ballot and must collect more than 100,000 signatures, with a limit of 2,500 from each of the vast country’s dozens of regions, not just the largest cities. Putin, who is running as an independent and not a candidate for the ruling United Russia party, has collected more than 3 million signatures.

While waiting to sign a petition in St. Petersburg, Alexander Rakityansky told the AP that he went through a “period of apathy when I thought I couldn’t do anything.” Now, however, he sees Nadezhdin’s campaign as an opportunity to exercise his civil rights.

Videos on the Internet show lines of people supporting him not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also in Krasnodar in the south, Saratov and Voronezh in the southwest, and in Yekaterinburg beyond the Ural Mountains. Even in the Far Eastern city of Yakutsk, 450 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, Nadezhdin’s team said up to 400 people a day braved temperatures dropping to minus 40 degrees Celsius to sign petitions.

At a signature collection site in Moscow, Kirill Savenkov, 48, said he supported Nadezhdin because of his stance on Ukraine and peace negotiations. Others said they wanted a real alternative to Putin, who they suggested had led the country into a dead end.

Nadezhdin’s campaign received a boost after opposition leaders abroad, including former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and supporters of Alexei Navalny, the jailed opposition politician, urged Russians to support any candidate who could deny him to Putin a part of the votes.

Exiled opposition activist Maxim Katz said on YouTube that whatever the outcome, Nadezhdin’s candidacy shows that “there is one thing we know right now: Talk of civic apathy in Russia is far from reality. “What we have is not civic apathy but civic famine, enormous hidden potential.”

Some analysts say the rise in support for Nadezhdin has surprised even the Kremlin, although Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, declared Thursday that “we do not consider him a rival.” Analysts say the election result is a foregone conclusion and that Putin will remain in power for another six years, but some also suggest it is still a moment of genuine political risk for the Kremlin, which must project an aura of legitimacy for the election be seen as a genuine dispute.

For Putin to win a convincing victory, he needs his supporters to go to the polls and his critics to stay home without “a glimmer of hope,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Foundation’s Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center for International Peace, a global affairs think tank, in Berlin.

“That’s why Nadezhdin is such a big problem,” Schulmann added in an interview. “It gives a ray of hope.”

Nadezhdin supporters who lined up in Moscow and St. Petersburg told the AP that it gave them a rare opportunity to be with like-minded people who want a leader other than Putin, 71, who has ruled Russia for 24 years.

So far, Russia’s Central Election Commission has approved three candidates nominated by parties represented in Parliament that largely support the Kremlin’s policies: Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party; Leonid Slutsky, of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party; and Vladislav Davankov, from the New People’s Party. Kharitonov ran against Putin in 2004 and finished a distant second.

In December, authorities excluded the candidacy of Yekatarina Duntsova, a former regional legislator who calls for peace in Ukraine. The commission cited technical errors in her documentation.

Duntsova was probably excluded because the authorities “don’t know her, so in their terms she is unpredictable. And above all, they dislike unpredictable things,” Schulmann said.

Although there have been claims that Nadezhdin secretly has the Kremlin’s approval to run and is seen as something of an unlikely candidate to win, he could be declared ineligible. He has appeared as an expert on Russian television and even criticized the conflict in Ukraine during a talk show on state network NTV in September 2022, an unusual level of visibility not enjoyed by other opposition politicians such as Navalny and Vladimir Kara. Murza, both now imprisoned.

In that appearance, Nadezhdin said Putin was misled by intelligence services who apparently told him that Ukrainian resistance would be short-lived and ineffective.

In his interview with the AP, Nadezhdin said he believes he has been allowed to run because he is a well-known entity and has not specifically criticized Putin.

“I know Putin personally,” he said, saying he met him before he became president in 2000. He added that in the 1990s he was an aide to then-Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, who is now deputy head of Putin’s presidential cabinet. Putin.

Schulmann said that while authorities could allow Nadezhdin to run, it is a “dangerous gamble.” “I think they will eliminate him at the next stage, when he brings those signatures,” he added, hinting that the Central Election Commission could declare some of them invalid and exclude him from the ballot, and that the authorities could also threaten him and his team with go to prison if he then urges his followers to protest.

The election is the first since Putin annexed four Ukrainian regions and the first to use internet voting nationwide. Critics suggest both are opportunities to manipulate the results in Putin’s favor, something the Kremlin has denied it will do.

Regardless of the actual outcome, some analysts and political opponents noted that watching those lining up in the cold for Nadezhdin reveals more about today’s Russia than the vote itself.

Although Nadezhdin believes that Putin’s team did not initially perceive it as a risk, he said that “in the Kremlin they are now in a difficult position.”

If I were in his place, he added, “they would now be thinking, ‘Why do we let him do this?’”