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Russian activist bruises Kremlin in key Urals city

An opposition campaigner famed for an anti-drugs project was Sunday set to defeat the pro-Kremlin candidate in fiercely contested elections for the mayor of Russia’s fourth-largest city Yekaterinburg.

Yevgeny Roizman was winning 33 percent of the vote while the candidate of the ruling United Russia Party, Yakov Silin, had 30 percent, the local elections commission said, in results based on reports from 500 of the 565 polling stations.

Should Roizman be confirmed as the winner, it will be one of the first times in Russian history an opposition candidate has beaten the ruling-party figure in an election for a city the size of Yekaterinburg.

Unlike the parallel mayoral election in Moscow, the Yekaterinburg poll is taking place in one round with the winner taking all.

Silin is currently deputy governor of the city’s wider region and his defeat would represent a clear rejection of the ruling elite in one of Russia’s key industrial regions.

The head of the local election commission, Ilya Zakharov, told reporters that there were now 10,000 votes separating the two men and “the tendency is hardly going to chance now”.

Roizman, standing as a candidate for the Civil Platform party of billionaire tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, had won prominence for his “City Without Drugs” anti-narcotics drive.

The project has been hugely controversial as it used merciless “cold turkey” methods at a rehab centre in the city to break addicts’ drug habits.

“We are sure that Zhenya (Roizman) has won. This is a great victory for him and our party,” said Prokhorov.

The election came after a bitter, deeply personal and sometimes even surreal campaign in the industrial centre of 1.35 million people, Russia’s candidate for the EXPO 2020 World Exposition.

Roizman faced allegations, which he vehemently denied, of links to the mafia, while the local press said he had a personal feud with the regional governor over a love triangle.

The woman at the top of the purported triangle, journalist and activist Aksana Panova, kept with Roizman and is now his campaign manager and partner.

On the day before the elections, false letters, purportedly signed by the head of the election commission, circulated saying that Roizman had been disqualified from the polls owing to a criminal probe.

The election commission Sunday confirmed it was a forgery but Roizman alleged the letters had been published by the governor’s office and had cost him votes.

Habitually dressed in a T-shirt or a sweatshirt, Roizman energised his campaign by going for public jogging sessions and is a complete contrast to the Soviet apparatchik style of Russian regional politicians.

The race had been predicted to be close and Roizman expressed no surprise over the strength of his result.

“We have stuck to our line and we are winning. There is no sensation, this is our city and we were born here,” he told the Ren-TV television channel.

His challenge has parallels to that of protest leader Alexei Navalny in the Moscow mayor election. But Yekaterinburg is a fiercely individual city and Roizman appears to have gained by having local roots.

Prokhorov ran a relatively successful campaign when he stood against Putin in presidential elections in 2012, coming second to the Russian strongman in Moscow.

But the Brooklyn Nets basketball team owner then vanished from the political scene, leaving many Russians wondering quite how sincere his Kremlin challenge was.