[6][7] In June 2024, days after being declared personally bankrupt by Rosenergobank, he resigned from his position as a Moscow Municipal Deputy, telling a Telegram news channel that it was under pressure from external actors.

He lost the election to the former commander of the Moscow District of Internal Troops, Arkady Baskayev (People's Party of the Russian Federation).

[11] In August 2005, Nadezhdin was a member of the initiative group for the nomination of the former head of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to the State Duma in the by-elections for the 201st University District of Moscow.

According to him, he had already held several round tables on this issue with the participation of nationalists, "And that’s why officers and young skinheads are now joining my department en masse.

[18] On 26 December 2011, Nadezhdin left Right Cause, explaining his decision by the desire to create a new right-wing party together with the former head of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, Alexei Kudrin.

[31] In the leadup to the 2021 Russian legislative election at the congress of the A Just Russia party, Nadezhdin was nominated as a candidate for deputy of the State Duma in the Dmitrov single-mandate electoral district No.

In April 2022, Nadezhdhin stated on an NTV talk show that the Soviet Union had "occupied Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe," which was met with controversy by other panellists.

[38] In the 2023 Moscow Oblast gubernatorial election, Nadezhdin nominated himself as a candidate for the Civic Initiative party but was denied registration because he could not collect the required number of signatures of municipal deputies in his support.

[43] As part of his campaign, Nadezhdin visited wives of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, telling them that the country wanted the war to stop.

Nadezhdin declared the termination of war as a main statement in his election program and wanted to initiate a new peace negotiations with Ukraine and the Western countries.

[52][7] His comment that the invasion of Ukraine was a "fatal mistake" by Putin was remarked by NBC News to be "a rare public stance in the country where the regime’s loudest critics are either jailed, exiled or dead".

[53] In late January 2024, a source in the Putin administration told the Latvia-based news outlet Meduza: "There’s a portion of the electorate that wants the war to end.

"[54] On 8 February 2024, Nadezhdin was barred from running against President Vladimir Putin in Russia's March presidential election due to alleged "irregularities" in the signatures of voters supporting his candidacy.

[56] His team said that some of the "errors" the election commission had claimed existed were merely minor typos that happened when handwritten names were put into its computers.

[57] The rejection of Nadezhdin's candidacy meant that only three candidates other than Putin were to be allowed to run, all from parties which have broadly backed the Kremlin's policies, and who are not seen to be genuine challengers.

[55] On Nadezhdin's campaign, Channel 4 News observed how "at best critics are disqualified, at worst, assassinated", discussing how Boris Nemtsov was killed in 2015, Vladimir Kara-Murza being poisoned and jailed and the same happenning to Alexei Navalny.

[59] In what has been described as something "seemingly unachievable in Russian politics",[7] his bid for presidency was supported by many opposition politicians and public figures: Yekaterina Duntsova (who was blocked from running on the ballot by the Central Election Commission[60][61]), Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Ekaterina Schulmann, Yulia Navalnaya (wife of Alexei Navalny), Ilya Varlamov, Lyubov Sobol, Maxim Katz and many others.

[62][63][64][65] Russia's main opposition leader Alexei Navalny also passed a message from his imprisonment giving his backing to Nadezhdin's campaign.

[52] Only one week after Nadezhdin was refused to be allowed to register as a candidate, Navalny was found dead in suspicious circumstances at his prison, which was one of Russia's most harsh penal colonies inside the Arctic Circle.

[69] Gallyamov said that there was no chance that Russia's Supreme Court would dispute the electoral commission's rejection of Nadezhdin's candidacy, saying "we should understand that all the institutions are fully controlled by Putin and his administration".

[69] The BBC observed that Nadezhdin had been "relatively critical of Vladimir Putin's full-scale war in Ukraine when few dissenting voices have been tolerated in Russia".

[56] Ekaterina Schulmann and other political commentators have stated that the Kremlin likely initially ignored Nadezdin's candidacy as he was perceived as uncharismatic and therefore harmless, until queues were seen to register their support for his campaign.

[44] The day before being barred as a candidate, Nadezhdin agreed it was inevitable that he would be disqualified and remarked that "in Russia we have no free and fair elections", but said he saw "no other good way to change the country" and said methods such as a maidan were "very bad".

[44] The Associated Press said that Nadezhdin's barring from the election was "a strong signal from the Kremlin that it won’t tolerate any public opposition to the invasion of Ukraine".

[59] CNN remarked that the refusal to allow Nadezhdin to run was "a move that further clears the country’s political landscape of opponents to Vladimir Putin".