THE BILLIONAIRE Russian owner of London's Evening Standardwas disqualified yesterday from standing as a candidate for mayor of the town of Sochi, in an apparent setback for Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and his attempt to portray Russia as a modern democracy.
A court in the Black Sea resort declared Alexander Lebedev’s candidacy invalid, ruling that the local election committee had acted illegally when it allowed him to register as a candidate last month for mayoral elections on April 26th.
Mr Lebedev described the decision as “insane”. He blamed the ruling on the pro-Kremlin regional administration and said that officials had grown increasingly terrified that their candidate, Anatoly Pakhomov, who is backed by Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin, could lose.
Mr Lebedev said: “The regional authorities were highly frustrated. They were irritated by my candidacy. There is no doubt that if I were to run there would be a second round of elections with two participants.”
Sochi’s bureaucrats were keen to avoid a runoff, which would be triggered if no candidate won more than 50 per cent of the vote, he said.
Election-fixing in Russia is routine. But there had been hopes that the poll in Sochi would be a genuine contest, given the high levels of media scrutiny and the fact that the resort is hosting the Winter Olympics in 2014.
The election had looked like being one of the more colourful in Russia’s monochrome voting history. As well as Mr Lebedev, the candidates included a ballerina, a mason, and Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent accused of murdering the dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London.
Mr Lugovoi, now an ultra-nationalist MP, dropped out on Kremlin advice. The only serious challenger left is Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader with the democratic Solidarity movement.
– ( Guardianservice)