Russian Socialite Enters Race to Challenge President Putin
MOSCOW
— A young socialite and television journalist whose father was a close
ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, declared her intention on
Wednesday to challenge him in the presidential election scheduled for
next March, a move liable to split the already feeble liberal
opposition.
The journalist, Ksenia A. Sobchak, 35, announced her presidential run in a video online on YouTube and also published a letter
in Vedomosti, Russia’s main business daily. She portrayed herself as a
candidate for those who reject the status quo, a candidate who could
give the struggling opposition a voice and challenge the tired, elderly
candidates from established parties who have been around for decades.
“You
want to show your active position, but your candidate is not authorized
to run? You don’t have a candidate? Tick Sobchak,” she wrote in the
newspaper. “You’re just using a legal and peaceful opportunity to say
‘Enough! I’m fed up with this!’”
The main liberal opposition candidate, Aleksei A. Navalny, has been banned from running because of convictions in fraud cases that he has called politically motivated.
He
has been campaigning anyway, and set up campaign offices across the
country, a rare move for someone without the backing of a mainstream
party.
Ms. Sobchak is the daughter of a former mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly A. Sobchak,
who was Mr. Putin’s mentor for years and who died in 2000 while
campaigning for Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin managed Mr. Sobchak’s final,
unsuccessful campaign in 1996; his animosity toward electoral politics
is said to date partly from that loss.
Portrayed sometimes as the Russian equivalent of Paris Hilton, Ms. Sobchak has long exhibited her upscale lifestyle on
social media, including Instagram, where she has some 5.2 million
followers. Her account is an endless parade of Paris fashion shows, yoga
retreats, yachts and expensive restaurants. She is married with an
infant son.
After announcing her candidacy, Ms. Sobchak, in a 30-minute interview
on TV Rain, or Dozhd, a small opposition television channel, said she
had recently seen Mr. Putin to interview him about her father for a
documentary and told him of her intention to run. He did not seem
pleased, she said.
“He
said that every person can make their own decisions and take
responsibility for them too,” said Ms. Sobchak. “I didn’t feel that he
liked my decision.“
Dmitri
S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, described Ms. Sobchak as “talented”
in a comment to TV Rain but suggested that she had a lot to learn.
“She’ll
have to make herself familiar with this from scratch,” Mr. Peskov said.
“Politics is different from journalism and from show business. This is a
completely different matter.”
Some
leaders of the liberal opposition expressed dismay, accusing her of
being a Kremlin stooge and a spoiler candidate meant to inject a measure
of excitement and legitimacy into a dull race. Mr. Putin, having run
Russia as president or prime minister for almost 18 years, is due to
seek his fourth term as president with no real opposition. He has yet to
formally announce that he will run, but is expected to do so by
December.
Sergey
Udaltsov, a political activist recently released from prison, compared
it to the last campaign, in 2012, when many believed that the Kremlin
convinced Mikhail D. Prokhorov, a billionaire businessman and the
principal owner of the Brooklyn Nets, to run.
“The Sobchak thing is too obvious,” Mr. Udaltsov wrote on Twitter, using a Russian expression for something evident: “The Kremlin’s ears stick out for a kilometer.”
Mr.
Navalny and his top aides are serving yet another brief prison sentence
over their campaign organizing, so they could not respond to the formal
announcement. But the two camps were already sniping at each other last
month, when rumors that Ms. Sobchak might run first began to circulate.
Mr. Navalny said he was “frustrated and upset” at the prospect, while his campaign manager, Leonid Volkov,
said it seemed like a bad joke. “It would be better if this remained a
joke,” he wrote on Facebook. “Or else it will turn into a very stupid
story.”
Ms.
Sobchak said in her TV interview that she hoped to gain Mr. Navalny’s
support after he is released, and said she would discuss withdrawing if
he were somehow allowed to run.
In
her work as a television journalist and talk-show host, Ms. Sobchak has
been unofficially banned as a presenter on state television since she
joined the anti-Kremlin protests in 2012. Some portrayed her candidacy
as a means to escape from the confines of TV Rain, which can only be
watched online or on cable.
“She
is too glamorous for Navalny’s electorate, but she can be supported by
people who are protesting against the country becoming increasingly
conservative, by people who are against clericalism,” said Aleksei V.
Makarkin, a political analyst and deputy head of the Center for
Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.
Although
it is impossible to gauge her support at this early stage, he said her
main motivation seemed personal. “Sobchak doesn’t want to create a
party,” he said in an interview, “I think she wants to be a star.”
Others were taken with the idea.
“Personally,
I don’t like Navalny’s dictatorial tendencies and believe that Sobchak
is a good candidate to consolidate representatives of the liberal
opposition,” said Vladislav Inozemtsev, a political analyst who leads
the Center for Post-Industrial Studies, another Moscow think tank.
“Russia
needs a leader who will be more of a visionary, instead of a manager
with a lot of experience at stealing government money or being
obsequious to the superiors,” he said. “In any case, this leader should
be a modern, open-minded person. In these terms, Ksenia is an ideal
candidate.”
There
are considerable hurdles for any opposition candidates entering the
presidential race, and particularly a woman. A candidate has to be
either nominated by a party in the federal Parliament, called the Duma,
or collect 300,000 signatures from at least 40 Russian regions. The
latter is considered impossible without vast financial resources or
months of organizing.
In addition, a recent poll by the Levada Center, a research organization, suggested
that 53 percent of respondents were opposed to a woman’s being
president of Russia and 32 percent said no woman in Russia was currently
fit for the job.
TV
Rain said Ms. Sobchak’s campaign adviser would be Vitali Shkliarov, a
Russian who worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign in the
United States. In recent months, Mr. Shkliarov has been preaching the
gospel of a more equitable, more disruptive political process in Russia,
pushing many novice politicians to run successfully for seats in local
municipal councils in Moscow.
Over
all, the general sense was that whether she was a Kremlin stooge or
not, the entrance of a glamorous young woman into mainstream Russian
politics would make what many consider a farcical race even more
fantastic.
“A circus with horses,” Viktor A. Shenderovich, one of the country’s most prominent political comedians, wrote on Facebook. “A new program.”
