MOSCOW  (AFP) – A Russian mayoral candidate who has been on hunger strike for three weeks protesting what he says were rigged local polls said Monday he would continue until the authorities call free elections.

“The 24th day of the hunger strike is over. Tomorrow will be day 25,” said Oleg Shein, who last month ran for mayor in the Volga city of Astrakhan, located 1,500 kilometres (990 miles) southeast of Moscow, and lost.

“We are not suicidal and we don’t see electing me mayor as our goal,” the 40-year-old Shein, who has been on hunger strike with two dozen other supporters, wrote on his blog.

“Our goal is honest elections that will put an end to the mafia system in Astrakhan.”

Shein, a member of the populist A Just Russia party, lost to a candidate from the ruling United Russia party, garnering around 30 percent of the vote while the frontrunner received 60 percent.

Shein claims he should have won 47 percent and his United Russia rival 42 percent had the vote not been rigged. He says he has documented evidence proving fraud.

Following the March 4 vote — where municipal polls coincided with the presidential election won by Vladimir Putin — Shein and more than 20 of his supporters have gone on hunger strike. Several have dropped out for health reasons.

Speaking to AFP, Shein said the governor of the Astrakhan region had recently visited the protesters urging them to stop.

“He told us to stop because this is causing political irritation in Moscow,” Shein said, his voice sounding weak.

Observers say the three-week hunger strike has taken its toll on the protesters, many of whom are now exhausted.

“Many can hardly talk and move,” said the Voters’ League, an opposition group comprising some of Russia’s most prominent cultural figures.

Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition parliament member with A Just Russia, said he would call on Russia’s outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev to intervene. The Kremlin has not yet publicly reacted to the protest.

Medvedev next month will cede his post to Putin, who secured a crushing victory in the March election which the opposition says was rigged.

Alexei Navalny, one of the most prominent opposition leaders, said he planned to go to Astrakhan to support the hunger strikers and called on others to follow his example and shift the focus of the protest movement to Astrakhan.

“Take your white ribbons, tents, hipster slogans and whatever else you have there and come along,” Navalny wrote on his blog.

“I am convinced that we have to go. Our entire protest movement will not be worth much if we are unable to transplant the protest where it is needed and awaited.”

Observers said Putin’s decisive victory took much of the sting out of the protest movement which had managed to muster huge protests in the Russian capital this past winter.

Several activists in Moscow including Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the Left Front leftist group, were also planning to go on hunger strike in the show of solidarity with those in Astrakhan, a Left Front spokeswoman said.