Pre-election selection

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Names of all possible presidential hopefuls became known. Observers note that the forthcoming elections in respect to the number of candidates will be the most moderate. Parties still have five days to nominate their candidates, but it seems that nothing more will happen. Thus all parties’ contenders are known, they are Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimit Zhirinovsky, Gennady Zyuganov and Boris Nemtsov. On Tuesday the central Election Commission finished accepting applications of self-nominees, which managed to gather initiative groups of 500 members. The CEC registered groups of two self-nominees, that is former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) Andrei Bogdanov. They passed at the second level and now can begin collecting the required 2 million signatures. Boris Nemtsov must do the same in contrast to Medvedev, Zhirinovsky and Zyuganow, who can be considered to be competent presidential candidates. Being candidates nominated by the parties, which have won seats in parliament, they needn’t collect signatures.

There are two more self-nominees who have managed to gather 500 supporters but they have bureaucratic difficulties. Oleg Shein hasn’t provided sufficient information on his work. He has no document confirming his status in KPSS, an organization, which he heads. There are information that the organization even is not registered. A famous dissident Vkadimir Bukovsky has a passport of a citizen of the Great Britain.

There is an agreement among Bukovsky, Kasyanov and Nemtsov that two of them can refuse from the presidential race in favor of the third if it is expedient. In this situation Nemtsov stands a better chance. Besides that, some skeptics assume that if “Kremlin democrat” Bogdanov has no problems with collecting of signatures, then the others can be eliminated during the verification of signatures. That means that in theory only four names can fall in the final list of candidates.

Meanwhile a week ago there were 25 presidential contenders. Many had to give up their ambitions. The group of supporters of the main ‘dissenter’ Garry Kasparov hasn’t managed to hold a congress. They rent a hall in the “Mir” cinema, but at the last minute the administration of the cinema refused to accept the meeting. The search of a new place turned out to be vain.

Former deputy and the leader of the Republican Party Vladimir Ryzhkov refused from the struggle for presidency himself; he named three reasons. The first is that his party has been abolished, so it can’t nominate a candidate. The second reason is a new law on the presidential elections, ‘which has actually introduced a prohibitive order of their carrying out’. And third Ryzhkov was confronted with impossibility to find lawyers, rent halls and offices for signature collecting.

The initiative group of the mayor of Arkhangelsk Alexander Donskoy neither managed to assemble. The local recreation centre refused to lease a place to them; and they had no time to search for a new hall. At the moment Donskoy is in a pre-trial detention center. He is accused of falsification of a high-school diploma, illegal entrepreneurship and exceeding his commissions. Donskoy assures that all these troubles have happened with him just because of his intention to run for presidency.

There were some other persons who wanted but didn’t manage to become candidates. That is a businessman Anzori Aksentyev who also self-nominated in 2004, but later gave up this idea. A journalist Maria Solovyenko called Putin to be ‘incomparable’ and decided this to be a sufficient reason to withdraw her candidature. After the rendering documents in the CEC a homeless Muscovite Ivan Sery (lit. Grey) disappeared somewhere too.

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