‘Mikhail Gorbachev’ to contest in Indonesia polls
Mikhail Gorbachev is running for office in Indonesian elections next week, but it’s not the octogenarian ex-Soviet leader who helped bring an end to the Cold War. The 32-year-old -- full name Mikhail Gorbachev Dom -- is vying for a seat in parliament, one of more than 245,000 candidates contesting the Southeast Asian nation’s biggest-ever polls on April 17. How the Indonesian Gorbachev got his name was slightly less earth shattering. “My parents were certain that they were going to have a girl so when I was born they panicked because they didn’t have a boy’s name ready,” the Jakarta resident told AFP. So he went nameless for a week until the couple spotted the elder Gorbachev’s name in a newspaper. “My father thought it was a cool name and he was an influential leader of the Soviet Union so they thought let’s give our son that name,” he said.
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