Photo Gallery A Challenge to Putin
Russia faces presidential this spring and it appears that Vladimir Putin's road back to the Kremlin may not be as free of obstacles as he thought. Billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov has stepped into the race.
Prokhorov has been accused of being a hand-picked Kremlin candidate to provide an outlet to anti-Putin frustration. He told SPIEGEL that is not the case. His chances of winning, however, appear slim.
Prokhorov isn't the only non-Putin candidate in the running. The Communists have put up a candidate of their own, Gennady Zyuganov. This Communist Party rally took place at a monument to Vladimir Lenin in Stavropol last week.
Russians were angered when current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and current Presidnet Dmitry Medvedev announced last September that they planned to switch places this spring.
Mikhail Prokhorov, one of Russia's richest tycoons and the owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, announced his candidacy in December.
But he refrains from direct criticism of Putin. Some commentators suggest he is merely the Kremlin's latest puppet, selected and approved as a candidate with Putin's blessing, in an effort to placate the high-income, Internet-savvy Moscow protest movement. But could the oligarch be pursuing his own goals, after all, and could his real objective be to unseat Putin sooner or later? Prokhorov himself says only that he has never been anyone's project.
With a net worth of 18 billion dollars, Prokhorov, 46, is in 32nd place on the American magazine Forbes' list of the world's richest people. Prokhorov's rivals are the frontrunner, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and three candidates who tend to toe the Kremlin line, including the relatively harmless Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, and Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Some see him as a puppet of the Kremlin, but he has been challenging Putin's policies by calling for privatization and less government, and by sayin the tenure of presidents should be limited to terms in a lifetime -- Putin is running for his third.
