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.”
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
INDICTED: US prosecutors said Sue Mi Terry accepted fancy handbags, luxury dinners and thousands of dollars in payments from South Korean intelligence A former CIA employee and senior official at the US National Security Council has been charged with allegedly serving as a secret agent for the South Korean National Intelligence Service, the US Department of Justice said. Sue Mi Terry accepted luxury goods, including fancy handbags, and expensive dinners at sushi restaurants in exchange for advocating South Korean government positions during media appearances, sharing nonpublic information with intelligence officers and facilitating access for South Korean officials to US government officials, an indictment filed in federal court in Manhattan, New York, says. She also admitted to the FBI that she served as a source