The low expectations of Boris Nadezhdin

A Putin challenger’s anti-war message has thousands of Russians lining up to support him. What’s the catch?

Across Russia and abroad, citizens have been lining up to add their signatures in support of the presidential candidacy of Boris Nadezhdin, a former State Duma deputy and a vocal opponent of the war in Ukraine. To join the race officially, Nadezhdin must collect 100,000 signatures by the end of January. His campaign website states that he’s collected tens of thousands of signatures, despite having had just 13,000 less than a week earlier. Numerous Russian opposition politicians have voiced support for Nadezhdin’s candidacy. So, who’s endorsed the ex-lawmaker that Russian Telegram channels are calling the “anti-war candidate,” and how is Nadezhdin’s signature drive going?

Update: As of the morning of January 23, Boris Nadezhdin has gathered more than the 100,000 signatures he needs to register his candidacy, according to his website. On Telegram, however, he wrote that the signatures “are not perfect” and that his campaign will need “105,000 flawless signatures” to join the election.

On January 20 and 21, long lines began forming outside the campaign offices of Boris Nadezhdin, a former Russian State Duma deputy who hopes to join the country’s presidential race in March 2024. Supporters arrived and waited to add their signatures supporting Nadezhdin’s candidacy. In cities across the country, there have been reports of both the lines themselves and various attempts to prevent the campaign from gathering the needed signatures.

On January 21, Nadezhdin’s campaign offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg announced they’d received the maximum number of signatures allowed from each city and were no longer accepting new endorsements here. On January 22, the campaign launched an initiative targeting the rest of the country, calling on supporters to share information about the number of signatures still needed in various regions.

Nadezhdin needs a total of 100,000 signatures in order for Russia’s Central Election (CEC) Commission to register his candidacy, but no more than 2,500 of the signatures can come from any single region.

On December 28, 2023, the CEC permitted Nadezhdin to begin gathering signatures for his candidacy. By January 16, according to the counter on the politician’s website, his supporters had collected nearly 13,000. Two days later, the number surpassed 25,000, and after several well-known opposition politicians endorsed Nadezhdin, the number began to rise even faster. At the time of this writing, the campaign has collected 56,078 of the signatures it needs, according to its site.

Which opposition figures have endorsed Nadezhdin?

One of the first reports on the lines forming at Nadezhdin’s headquarters came from exiled activist Maxim Katz, who shared a video about the “potential hidden in Russian society”:

Nadezhdin’s prospects for joining the race, of course, are still in doubt. Whether the campaign will get the signatures, whether [the CEC] will register his candidacy based on those signatures — all of that is a black box over which we don’t have much power. And whatever the outcome is, it’s not worth getting upset over. But there is one thing we know right now: conversations about civic apathy in Russia are very far from reality. What we have is not civic apathy but a civic famine — an enormous hidden potential.

Katz also pointed out that Nadezhdin doesn’t yet have the signatures he needs, especially in the country’s more remote regions. He called on Russians to go to the former lawmaker’s offices and add theirs.

On January 20, Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, shared the addresses of several of Nadezhdin’s campaign headquarters on 𝕏. The following day, he posted a video on YouTube in support of Nadezhdin’s campaign, though he added that the Kremlin will most likely not let Nadezhdin join the race:

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? Sure, Nadezhdin is far from my dream candidate. My candidate is Navalny. Nadezhdin is not even [exiled Belarusian former presidential candidate Sviatlana] Tsikhanouskaya, who represented the people. 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.

Other opposition figures who have expressed support for Nadezhdin’s candidacy include former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, opposition politician Lyubov Sobol, Navalny ally Georgy Alburov, political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, and former Echo of Moscow editor-in-chief Alexey Venediktov, as well as journalist Ekaterina Duntsova, who previously hoped to take part in the 2024 election as an anti-war candidate herself but was barred from running by the CEC over alleged paperwork errors. Duntsova wrote on Telegram:

Friends, you’ve all seen how many people are lining up in front of Nadezhdin’s campaign offices. All of these people feel the same way we do: they want there to be a different candidate on the ballot. A candidate who would change the current destructive course, and a candidate who would represent us all.

According to Nadezhdin’s campaign office in the town of Yaroslavl, one of the signatures in support of his candidacy came from Vladislav Davankov, a candidate representing the New People Party and one of Nadezhdin’s would-be opponents in the election.

Nadezhdin told the Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit that he didn’t expect to receive such widespread support. He said he believes the sudden spike in the number of people signing for his candidacy is the result of a “demand for peace and change” in Russian society:

At the very beginning of the campaign, in October, nobody believed we’d be able to hold a party congress and nominate a candidate. When the congress was held, no one believed the CEC would let us collect signatures and open a [campaign] account. When they let us open an account at the New Year, nobody believed that we’d be able to open offices all over Russia and collect donations over the holidays. The realization that we might succeed came around January 10. And the confidence came last weekend.

Who is Boris Nadezhdin? And will he actually be allowed to join the race?

The Civic Initiative Party nominated Boris Nadezhdin to run in Russia’s upcoming presidential election. The war critic’s political career began in the early 1990s when he was elected to the city council of Dolgoprudny, a town in the Moscow region. In 1997–1998, he served as an assistant to then-Prime Minister Sergey Kiriyenko.

In 1999, as a member of the Union of Right Forces Party, Nadezhdin was elected by party list to the Russian State Duma, where he became the deputy leader of the party’s faction until 2003. Since then, he hasn’t served in the federal parliament or any regional legislatures, though he has competed in multiple elections. In 2019, Nadezhdin joined the council of deputies for the Dolgoprudny urban district. In recent years, he has represented the parties A Just Russia and Civic Initiative in elections, though he was barred from running for governor of the Moscow region in 2023.

Nadezhdin’s announcement that he intends to run for president was immediately followed by media speculation that his candidacy had been coordinated with the Kremlin, though he denies these rumors. An acquaintance of the aspiring candidate told Meduza that the Putin administration did make such an offer but “with no clear guarantees of being nominated.”

Nadezhdin’s campaign site calls him a “principled opponent of the policies of the current president.” “Putin sees the world from the past, and that’s where he’s dragging Russia. Russia needs a future — a future as a country that free and educated people will look up to and want to return or move to,” reads his political platform.

Nadezhdin’s position on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is one of the key points of his campaign. In his platform, he says Vladimir Putin “made a fatal mistake by starting the special military operation.” It continues: “Not a single one of the goals of the SVO has been fulfilled. And they’re unlikely to be fulfilled without enormous damage to Russia’s economy and an irreparable demographic blow to the country.” He goes on to argue that Russia should end the war and “start peace negotiations with Ukraine and the West.”

Political analyst Fedor Krasheninnikov told Meduza that he believes Russia’s Central Election Commission won’t likely approve Nadezhdin’s candidacy. “It seems to me that the public is getting excited and repeating the same mistake from Duntsova’s campaign: assuming it can impose its own strategy and its favored candidate on the Kremlin,” he said:

Nadezhdin wasn’t immediately axed because he seemed utterly hopeless. Now, with all the fuss around him involving figures detested by the Kremlin, I see no reason they would register him. I’m about 85 percent certain that they’ll take him out [of the race] based on the signatures, and that will be the end of it — no matter how many signatures there are or how high-quality they are.

A source close to the Kremlin told Meduza that there will not be any anti-war candidates on the presidential ballot “in any scenario.” The person said the Putin administration doesn’t foresee the situation having any serious consequences, such as street protests.