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This Friday, the 5th National Election Commission of Russia authorized the registration of Leonid Slutsky, from the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, and Vladislav Davankov, from the New People’s Party, as candidates for the March 2024 presidential elections, in which the clear favorite is the current president Vladimir Putinwho will seek re-election.
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Master and lord of Russian politics since assuming the presidency in 2000, Putin’s last re-election was recorded in 2018, when he won with 76.69% of the votes, against 11.77% for Pavel Grudini, his closest competitor. .
A new law signed in 2021 also opened the door for him to continue leading Russia until 2036.
For the elections to be held between March 15th and 17th, Putin will have to face – for now – two politicians who agree on both the vision of national foreign policy and the internal management of the Legislature controlled by the ruling United Russia.
A month ago, the National Electoral Commission rejected the registration of journalist Yekaterina Duntsova, who is in favor of ending the war in Ukraine; and recently reported that the registration of Nikolai Kharitonov, Putin’s rival in the 2004 elections, has not yet been accepted.
All these conditions, and the profiles of his virtual electoral rivals, raise suspicions about Putin’s attempts to give a democratic veneer to elections that are clearly guaranteed.
Slutsky, born in Moscow 56 years ago and an economist by profession, worked as a banker and advisor to the mayor of Moscow before becoming a deputy in December 1999. He has since renewed his place in the Duma elections after election and in 2016 became President of the Parliament’s International Affairs Committee.
From his positions, he defended and supported the Kremlin’s foreign policy on more than one occasion. This made Slutsky one of the first to be sanctioned by the United States government in 2014, following the Crimean annexation referendum. With the resulting crisis on the peninsula, Canada and the European Union included it on their own sanctions lists.
An investigation by the independent Dozhd channel also revealed that Slutsky financed pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk through one of his foundations linked to the Russian Orthodox Church.
In 2018, Slutsky was accused of sexual harassment by three journalists and a television producer. However, despite more and more voices being added against the parliamentarian, including a statement from the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman María Zajárova, Slutsky was freed from the scandal thanks to a shield provided by a Duma commission that determined that there were no “conduct violations” on their part.
Davankov, on the other hand, serves as deputy speaker of the Duma and his formation called New People has 15 of the chamber’s 450 seats.
Born 39 years ago in the city of Smolensk, Davankov worked at the company Faberlic, founded by businessman and politician Alexei Nechaev, who later took him to the nascent New People party, thus reaching the Duma in 2021.
A month later, he was appointed deputy speaker of the Lower House of Parliament by decision of Vyacheslav Volodin. In 2022 he was sanctioned by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Ukraine, because he was one of those responsible for ratifying Putin’s decision to establish an alliance between Russia. the separatist rebels of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Furthermore, the West accuses him of being someone “who provides political and economic support to Russia’s illegal attempts to annex Ukrainian sovereign territory through false referenda”.
Source: Elcomercio
I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.
