MOSCOW, August 15 (RIA Novosti) – A British actress famous for her role in the fantasy television series “Game of Thrones” enjoys going for nighttime walks around Russia’s fourth-largest city, Yekaterinburg, “confident that nobody’s going to harass or rape me” – or at least that’s how she was depicted in a campaign for a vice governor running for mayor.
Emilia Clarke, 26, who shot to stardom with her portrayal of Daenerys Targaryen, a young queen with a steel will and three pet dragons, was recently pictured as a supposed “Anya, 24,” in a Facebook post by Deputy Governor Yakov Silin’s campaign page.
“I suddenly noticed that I haven’t been afraid to take walks around Yekaterinburg at night the last couple of years,” the post says. “It’s so wonderful: few people around, the streetlamps alight, the fresh air. It’s incredibly beautiful, especially after the rain.”
Silin, a deputy governor of the Ural Mountains’ Sverdlovsk Region, is campaigning on a promise to make the region’s capital city, Yekaterinburg, “the most modern Eurasian megalopolis,” his campaign’s Facebook page says.
But the actress’s supposed walks around nighttime Yekaterinburg triggered a storm of sarcasm on local blogs, prompting administrators of the campaign page to issue a statement claiming that “Anya’s” comment was a “fantasy post,” not an “epic fail” as dubbed by Znak.com, which exposed the post on Wednesday and supports a rival candidate.
“We assure you, gentlemen, that Daenerys Targaryen is just a beautiful woman here. We don’t aspire to her support, but we wouldn’t be ashamed of showing her around Yekaterinburg,” said the statement, posted on the campaign page.
To drive the point home, the Facebook page offered another post with a picture of Bryan Cranston, who played a chemistry teacher-turned-illicit drug maker in the hit US television show “Breaking Bad.” The post included a comment promising a happy life, free of crime, for any chemist in Yekaterinburg.
Russia is holding a round of regional elections on September 8, and the run-up has already delivered its share of strange campaign moves. The most recent oddity was reported in the Siberian republic of Buryatia, where a local politician was accused of retooling the Nazi slogan “Germany above all” for his own campaign, replacing “Germany” with “Buryatia.”
