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Russian journalist Yekaterina Gordon withdraws from presidential election race

Gordon said "she is not going to participate in a farce"

Yekaterina Gordon Alexander Scherbak/TASS

Yekaterina Gordon

© Alexander Scherbak/TASS

MOSCOW, January 26. /TASS/. Singer and journalist Yekaterina Gordon, nominated for the Russian presidency from the Party of Good Deeds, has declared she is quitting the race.

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"I would like to say this. I am not going to participate in a farce. I do not want to participate in a show. I will not present the collected signatures to the Central Election Commission," Gordon told a news conference in Moscow on Friday.

She declared that the goal set, that of collecting the required number of signatures, had been achieved.

"We have collected 105,000 signatures," she added.

Earlier, the decision to quit was declared by two other nominees - Roman Khudyakov, from the Honest Party, and Anton Bakov, from the Monarchist Party.

Who participates in the campaign

Currently fourteen candidates are pushing ahead with their election campaigns - two self-nominees and twelve candidates from political parties. The self-nominees are the incumbent, Vladimir Putin, and member of the Kostroma regional legislature Vladimir Mikhailov, a holder of the Honored Inventor of Russia title.

The political parties’ nominees are Vladimir Zhirinovsky (of the Liberal Democratic Party LDPR), Pavel Grudinin (of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), Elvira Agurbash (of the Green Alliance), Sergey Baburin (of the Russian All-People’s Union), Irina Volynets (of the People’s Party), Stanislav Polishchuk (of the Party of Social Reforms), Ksenia Sobchak (of the Civil Initiative), Maksim Suraikin (of the Communists of Russia), Boris Titov (of the Party of Growth), Grigory Yavlinsky (of Yabloko), Natalya Lisitsina (Rot Front), and Mikhail Kozlov (of the Social Protection party).

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All of them, except for Zhirinovsky and Grudinin, must collect and present signatures in their support. The LDPR and CPRF candidates are exempt from sign-up campaigns as candidates from parliamentary parties and have been registered already. The self-nominees are to collect 300,000 signatures and candidates from out-of-parliament parties, 100,000 signatures.

The election teams of some candidates (Putin, Titov, Yavlinsky, Sobchak and Suraikin) have declared they have collected the required number of signatures. The deadline for submitting the sign-up lists and documents for registration to the CEC is 18:00 of January 31.

The presidential election is due on March 18.

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