Unknown to the general public, journalist Ekaterina Duntsova wants to run for the Russian presidential election in March 2024.
In the early 2010s, Ekaterina Duntsova’s eldest daughter drew her mother debating Russian President Vladimir Putin on television.
Ten years later, the little-known journalist and mother of three children, from a small town in western Russia, wants to run in the Russian presidential election of March 2024 against Vladimir Putin.
She remembers the drawing with amusement.
The journalist worked for a local media outlet in Rzhev, a town of 60,000 inhabitants located 230 kilometers west of Moscow.
Until now unknown to the general public, she presents herself as a pacifist, for individual freedoms, the release of political prisoners and the decentralization of power.
Working for a local television station led him to take an interest in the concerns of individuals. She is gradually turning towards civic engagement.
“I couldn’t just observe what was happening, I had to participate in it myself,” she explains.
In 2009, 10 years before joining the local legislative body, Ekaterina Duntsova collected nearly 4,000 signatures in support of a local campaign for the restoration of direct municipal elections in Rzhev, abandoned earlier that year following a campaign of the Kremlin for the centralization of power in Russia.
She hopes this experience will be useful in her presidential candidacy.
Russian election law requires all independent candidates to collect 300,000 unique election signatures.
Applications must also be approved by a group of at least 500 supporters gathered in a single location. Ekaterina Duntsova plans to hold the meeting in Moscow, despite fears that the authorities will ban it.
The independent candidate has already been summoned for questioning in Rzhev after announcing her intention to run in the elections. Prosecutors asked him to clarify his political views and his use of the term “peace.”
She said she invoked her constitutional right to silence.
“Of course I’m afraid,” she says as the Kremlin targets activists and the opposition. However, she insists on the need to “present an alternative” to the current regime.
The idea that a woman could be a candidate against Vladimir Putin seemed interesting to him. “It would really be something different. Rigidity and hardness versus softness, kindness, peace,” she adds.
She insists that she is not a power puppet secretly supported by the Kremlin in order to give the vote a semblance of competitiveness, a common practice in Putin’s Russia.