Russian journalist, former reality show host and socialite Ksenia Sobchak on Wednesday announced that she intends to stand for president next year as an opposition candidate.
“My name is Ksenia Sobchak. I am standing for president,” she wrote on a Web site announcing her bid, declaring that her campaign slogan is “I am the ‘none of the above’ candidate.”
Russian elections used to allow voters to tick a box titled “none of the above” to reject all candidates.
Photo: AP
“Like every Russian citizen I have the right to run for the presidency. I have decided to use that right,” Sobchak said.
As an independent candidate, Sobchak has to collect 300,000 signatures of support.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet announced his expected candidacy in the polls in March next year.
In a letter published on the Web site of the Vedomosti business daily, Sobchak said she realized she would be viewed as an unlikely candidate, but she vowed that she would support opposition leader Alexei Navalny and call for him to be allowed to stand, after electoral authorities have said he is not eligible due to him serving a suspended sentence for fraud.
“I am going to the polls not simply as a candidate, but as a mouthpiece for all those who cannot become candidates,” she wrote. “I am against revolution, but I am a good middleman and organizer.”
Navalny wants a peaceful handover of power and “that is right, but they won’t believe him,” Sobchak wrote. “They will believe me.”
Sobchak, 35, comes from a political dynasty as her father Anatoly Sobchak was a popular mayor of St Petersburg, whose aide was a little-known former KGB agent called Vladimir Putin.
The glamorous blonde gained fame by presenting popular reality show Dom-2, in which couples have to form romantic relationships.
Seen as a party girl, she also had her own reality show Blonde in Chocolate, which she once presented from a bubble bath.
She surprised many by joining opposition protests in 2012 against Putin over fraud-tainted elections.
At the time she was the girlfriend of a prominent young opposition politician, Ilya Yashin.
Sobchak attempted to bring the protest message to the masses through a discussion show she hosted on Russian MTV, but it was pulled after one episode when Sobchak tried to invite on Navalny.
She later presented her own show on TV Rain, an independent television channel, with Navalny as one of her interviewees.
She has since married actor Maxim Vitorgan and they have a son.
“Over the five years since the wave of protests in 2012, my political views have definitively formed,” Sobchak wrote. “I am ready to declare them and stand up for them at any level, even the highest.”
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS