Russia’s Supreme Court on February 21 threw out anti-war presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin’s latest appeal of the Central Election Commission’s (TsIK) decision to bar him from next month’s presidential election.
The Uzbekistan-born 60-year-old academic and former lawmaker had appealed the Central Election Commission’s final decision to bar him from the election.
TsIK, which routinely refuses to register would-be opposition candidates on the pretext that they submitted an insufficient number of valid signatures, disqualified thousands of signatures Nadezhdin's representatives gathered across the country to reach the 100,000-signature threshold needed to be registered as a candidate.
"The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused to satisfy my claim to challenge the refusal to register. I will appeal the decision within 5 days. On February 26, the Court will consider appeals on the first two claims," Nadezhdin said in a post on Telegram.
"I will not accept failure."
Last week the same court rejected two other appeals he filed over TsIK decisions related to the collection of signatures on petitions to register his candidacy. The decision on February 21 can be appealed to the Appeal Board of the Supreme Court.
The first appeal was related to the TsIK's explanation of its decision by the fact that many of Nadezhdin's representatives who collected the signatures had power of attorney papers certified by notary offices in regions other than the ones in which they were collecting signatures.
Nadezhdin insists that TsIK abused its powers because no Russian law says signature collectors' powers of attorney must be certified by notary offices in the same regions where the signatures are collected.
In his second appeal, Nadezhdin questioned the TsIK's documents on checking his supporters' signatures, saying the TsIK failed to add written conclusions of handwriting experts to its signatures’ inspection protocols.
Nadezhdin, who was proposed as a presidential candidate by the Civic Platform party, is the only politician with presidential ambitions who has publicly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and criticized incumbent Vladimir Putin. Russia's presidential election is scheduled to be held March 15-17.
Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and are neither free nor fair but are viewed by the government as necessary to convey a sense of legitimacy.
They are mangled by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and other means of manipulation.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin's tight grip on politics, media, law enforcement, and other levers means Putin, who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999, is certain to win, barring a very big, unexpected development.
But the surprising show of support for the little-known Nadezhdin, whose platform says the invasion of Ukraine was a "fatal mistake" and accuses Putin of dragging Russia into the past instead of building a sustainable future, is complicating the Kremlin's more aggressive ambition of boosting the perception of Putin's legitimacy.
Those who were expected to be Putin's main challengers currently are either incarcerated or fled the country, fearing for their safety.
Aleksei Navalny, a leading opposition voice who attempted to run against Putin in 2018, was barred by the TsIK over a conviction in a fraud case in what is widely seen as a politically motivated conviction.
Navalny died in prison on February 16 after he reportedly collapsed while being on a daily walk out of his cell. No official cause of death has been given by authorities, who have refused to turn the body over to family saying they will need two weeks to investigate "chemical forensics."