KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine - This steel-making city of 647,000 people in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast is a key battleground over the transparency and fairness of Ukraine's elections.
At stake in the Nov. 15 mayoral runoff election is whether allegations of vote fraud that favored an incumbent candidate tied to the disgraced regime of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych will be properly addressed.
The election also exposed the glaring problem of local “franchises” of pro-Ukrainian national parties allegedly being sold to allies of disgraced Yanukovych.
Surprisingly for a city that has historically been a stronghold of pro-Russian politicians, a European-leaning candidate got a share of the vote almost equal to that of a former member of Yanukovych’s once dominant Party of Regions.
Official results show that Yury Vilkul, a former associate of Yanukovych, won with 49.25 percent, while Yury Milobog from the Samopomich Party got 48.83 percent.
Vilkul, who represents the pro-Kremlin Opposition Bloc, has run the city since 2010. His son Oleksandr, an ex-governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, lost in the Nov. 15 mayoral run-off in Dnipropetrovsk.
The difference between Milobog and Vilkul is a mere 752 votes, according to the city’s election commission.
Samopomich and EuroMaidan Revolution activists in Kryvyi Rih say that the vote was rigged and are calling for a recount.
Milobog won in five out of Kryvyi Rih’s six districts, Samopomich said.
Vilkul received abnormally high results – from 70 to 90 percent – at hospitals, psychiatric asylums and prisons, where there were few or no observers and where there is a broad scope for administrative abuses, according to Samopomich.
“This means that only Vilkul supporters get sick… I want to congratulate you on the year 2004,” Miloboh joked at a rally of his supporters on Nov. 17, referring to vote rigging in the 2004 presidential election, which led to the Orange Revolution. “Then the whole of Ukraine was raped, now Kryvyi Rih is being raped.”
On Nov. 18, the police started a criminal investigation into alleged vote fraud.
However, Kryvyi Rih’s election commission, which is dominated by supporters of Vilkul, proclaimed him the winner at 5 a.m. on Nov. 16 before considering complaints from Milobog and the Samopomich Party.
“By any account, this was an extremely fast vote count…we saw election districts on the outskirts of town file their results before the centrally-located districts,” said Artem Yablanovsky, an observer with the Opora watchdog group. “This was suspicious to say the least.”
Maryna Akimova, a spokeswoman for Vilkul, told the Kyiv Post that the decision was made before the complaints were filed but Milobog said she was lying.
The quick victory announcement triggered a backlash from Milobog supporters, with about 1,000 people rallying in front of city hall where the local election commission was based on Nov. 17. About 150 Samopomich backers also held a rally the following day at the Central Election Commission in Kyiv.
Samopomich member of parliament Semen Semenchenko also arrived to lend his support.
The commission eventually registered members of the city council in what Samopomich describes as an effort to prematurely “anoint” and “crown” Vilkul by holding a meeting of the newly elected city council.
The meeting took place early on Nov. 18 and effectively confirmed Vilkul as mayor.
It was held with numerous procedural violations, with lawmakers failing to submit their documents and register as newly-elected city council members, Samopomich says.
“It was not a real city council meeting,” Serhiy Vysotsky, a Verkhovna Rada member from the People’s Front party, wrote in his blog on Nov. 18. “… There was no agenda and no registration. No one compiled a list of the city council members present. De facto and de jure Vilkul was proclaimed mayor in a room filled with unidentified people. This is nonsense.”
Akimova denied the accusations, saying that the city council members had been properly registered.
Another decision that further contributed to public discontent is that the city election commission rejected all of Samopomich’s complaints considered on Nov. 17, except for one calling for a recount at a polling station in Kryvyi Rih’s Inhuletsky district.
The Inhuletsky district’s commission postponed its meeting on Nov. 18 many times before finally recounting the votes at the polling station and concluding that no vote rigging took place.
Milobog told the Kyiv Post he considered the recount invalid, saying the doors and a sack with ballots did not have seals on them. Moreover, the district commission did not allow Samopomich observers to see voter lists, he added.
The city election commission was scheduled to consider on Nov. 19 other complaints filed by Milobog.
One of the most controversial aspects of the commission and city council meetings was that representatives of some pro-Ukrainian parties effectively backed Vilkul.
At the city’s election commission, representatives of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkyvshchyna party and Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party supported decisions favoring Vilkul almost every time. Representatives of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and the People’s Front also backed Vilkul on most crucial issues.
On Nov. 18, members of the Radical Party, Batkyvshchyna and the President Petro Poroshenko Bloc were present at the city council meeting that confirmed Vilkul as mayor.
Reacting to the scandal, Batkyvshchyna disbanded its faction in Kryvyi Rih’s city council and expelled all its members from the party on Nov. 18.
Lyashko wrote on Facebook on the same day that he had disbanded the Kryvyi Rih party cell “for selling out to Party of Regions members” and called them “whores.”
Meanwhile, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc cancelled its Kryvyi Rih cell’s statement confirming Vilkul’s victory and called for a recount.
Batkyvshchyna and the People’s Front also applied for recalling their representatives from the city’s election commission.
The Central Election Commission may consider the issue on Nov. 19, said Andriy Mahera, a deputy head of the commission.
“If we had ideological parties, not political projects based on their leaders’ charisma, franchises for political parties wouldn’t be sold,” Milobog told the Kyiv Post.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
