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.”
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