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    16-Feb-2018

Against Putin, 7 Candidates and One Glaring Absence

 

AFP

 

Seven candidates are lined up against Vladimir Putin in a Russian presidential election next month that he is all but guaranteed to win, extending his Kremlin term to 2024 with a fourth term in office.
 
His competitors include a former reality TV star and a director of a fruit farm, but Putin's primary political opponent will be absent from the ballot.
 
- Alexei Navalny: elephant in the room -Alexei Navalny, a charismatic anti-corruption blogger turned opposition politician who has organised several large anti-Kremlin protests, has been barred from running in the March election.
 
Russia's electoral commission rejected his candidacy application because of a criminal conviction which Navalny says is politically motivated.
 
The 41-year-old is widely regarded as Vladimir Putin's principal opponent and has a loyal support base.
 
Navalny has called for a boycott of the vote in protest against his candidacy being banned.
 
- Pavel Grudinin: communist millionaire -Nicknamed the "strawberry king", 57-year-old Grudinin is the Russian Communist Party's surprise candidate. 
 
Director of a former state fruit farm which he turned into a profitable business, Grudinin is Putin's most popular competitor. Polls show seven percent of Russians are ready to put him in the Kremlin.
 
He has been vilified in the pro-Kremlin press for his alleged wealth and foreign bank accounts. He has denounced "constant pressure" from the authorities.
 
While openly criticising some of the government's policies, Grudinin stops short of personally attacking Putin.
 
- Ksenia Sobchak: reality TV star -Ksenia Sobchak surprised Russians in October by declaring herself a candidate in the vote with the slogans "against them all", and "none of the above".
 
A former reality TV star, Sobchak took part in Russia's 2012 anti-Putin protests before becoming a presenter on the independent TV Dozhd channel.
 
The 36-year-old has made no secret of her close ties to Putin, who worked with her father Anatoly Sobchak when he was mayor of Saint Petersburg in the 1990s.
 
This has led many to suggest her campaign is a bid to give the polls a veneer of competition and split the opposition vote. Sobchak insists her bid is genuine. 
 
- Vladimir Zhirinovsky: populist troublemaker -Vladimir Zhirinovsky is a Russian presidential election regular. The March vote will be the 71 year-old's sixth presidential race.
 
The leader of the ultra-conservative LDPR party is known for his fiery anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-communist speeches.
 
He is considered by many observers to be the Kremlin's token opponent and is often described as a clown in Russian political circles. 
 
Though marginalised in recent years, Zhirinovsky continues to deliver nationalistic rants in the Duma and regularly appears on Russian television talk shows.
 
Around five percent of Russians are forecast to vote for him next month.
 
- Grigory Yavlinsky: veteran liberal -Veteran liberal politician Grigory Yavlinsky is running for the Russian presidency for the third time. 
 
Yavlinsky gained less than 10 percent of the vote in the 1996 and 2000 elections.
 
He refused to run in the 2004 election, accusing Putin of rigging the vote. He was ejected from the 2012 presidential race at the last minute -- a move he said was politically motivated after he came out in support of anti-Putin protestors.
 
The 66-year-old, who founded his Yabloko party in 1993, opposed the annexation of Crimea and has been critical of Moscow's role in Syria.
 
He remains a prominent critic of Putin and Russia's ruling United Russia party but is tolerated by the Kremlin. Parts of the divided Russian liberal opposition view him with scepticism.
 
- Boris Titov: the businessman -A representative of the Russian business community, Boris Titov announced his candidacy in the election without any illusion about the result.
 
Speaking in Crimea on a campaign trip in February, Titov admitted that "nobody has any doubt who will win the election" and said the main aim of the vote is to "convince the authorities, and Putin, to reform the economy." 
 
The 57-year-old supports the Kremlin's foreign policy but has called for normalising relations with the West to stabilise the Russian economy.
 
Titov's family owns the Russian winery Abrau-Durso, which has existed in the southern Krasnodar region since the 19th century.
 
His Party of Growth won less than two percent in the 2016 election.
 
- Sergei Baburin: unknown nationalist -The 59 year-old leader of the nationalist People's Union party, Sergei Baburin, is largely unknown to the public and rarely mentioned in the media.
 
A former vice speaker of the Russian Duma, Baburin says he has been fighting against the "neoliberalism" of the Russian authorities for over 20 years.
 
- Maxim Suraykin: rebel communist -Many Russians have also never heard of Maxim Suraykin.
 
The 39-year-old is a former member of the Russian Communist party who broke away in 2012 and founded the Communists of Russia party.
 
The Russian Communist Party views the Communists of Russia as a spoiler party and even took it to court for supposedly stealing its symbolism.
 
Suraykin's programme says "it is necessary for Russia to have a Stalinist communist president".
 

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