As votes are still being counted from Ukraine's Oct. 25 municipal elections, the results are already taking shape.
One big winner: Democracy itself, with international observers – the most influential among them, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe – giving a qualified thumbs-up to the contest.
One big loser: Parties in power. Although the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko continues to receive the most support among voters, according to exit polls, the popularity of ruling parties is in considerable decline since last year’s parliamentary election.
Read the Kyiv Post Live Feed from the Oct. 25 election.
The disenchantment with politicians is also reflected in the turnout – only 46.6 percent of the nation’s 26.7 million registered – came to vote for 10,000 local mayors and 160,000 regional and local officials in a nation where the president, prime minister and parliament still wield the most power.
Ukraine’s elections officials have not said when they will certify the official results. Two cities, Mariupol and Krasnoarmiisk, are yet to vote. The elections there were canceled for disputed reasons.
There were other losers as well. One is media freedom, in the assessment of OSCE’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. In its post-election statement, the international governmental organization wrote:
“The political and business interests controlling the media often influence editorial policy, and paid-for coverage is widespread,” according to the statement.
While Poroshenko’s party did well in Kyiv, leading the city council election with 28 percent of the vote, exit polls show it failed in other major cities.
In Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Lviv, the bloc’s candidates received 6 to 12 percent, giving way to local parties and newly formed parties like Vidrodzhennya that sheltered many former members of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych Party of Regions.
In 2014, Poroshenko’s Bloc and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front led the election with 21-22 percent of votes each.
The People’s Front didn’t take part in the local election – Yatsenyuk saying he would rather focus on his job as the prime minister – and Poroshenko’s Bloc failed to capitalize on the chance and claim the votes that previously went to its ally.
In the mayoral race, Poroshenko’s Bloc is close to winning over Kyiv, but that’s it.
In Odesa, Poroshenko Bloc’s Sasha Borovik won 30 percent of votes, according to an exit poll. But he is still losing to Hennadiy Trukhanov, former head of the local division of Party of Regions. In Kyiv and Odesa, the party was represented by highly publicized figures of current mayor and boxing champion Vitali Klitschko and Borovik, an aide to Odesa Governor Mikheil Saakashvili and a former deputy economy minister.
Yuriy Lutsenko, the member of parliament who heads the Poroshenko Bloc, said the party’s departments in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk worked poorly and the consequences will follow.
“We may force the dismissals of our representatives in state institutions and liquidate the local formations that discredited the party,” Lutsenko said on Oct. 26.
For Kyiv and most of the big cities, the election is not over. In the cities where none of the mayoral candidates got more than 50 percent of votes, the two top runners will clash in the runoff on Nov. 15.
Another party from the ruling coalition, Samopomich, that was supported by nearly 11 percent of votes in 2014 parliament election, won the local council election in its anchor region, Lviv Oblast, with over 30 percent of votes and got up to 15 percent of votes in other regions.
At the same time, Samopomich leader and current Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi got close to winning in the first tour with 48 percent of the votes, according to the exit poll conducted by Savik Shuster Studio. If there is a runoff, Sadovyi will compete against runner-up Ruslan Koshulinsky, member of nationalist party Svoboda, whose support was more than three times smaller in the first tour.
The election was marked with a very low turnout of 46.6 percent. Vitaliy Teslenko, deputy head of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, the election watchdog, blamed the low turnout on the parties and candidates who used the old rhetoric, promising general things like European future and higher pensions, instead of focusing on smaller, specific issues that are important for the voters in the local elections.
Kyiv-based political technologist and analyst Taras Berezovets predicted the low turnout in the morning of the election day – and also blamed it on the participants.
“This campaign has become the most dull and unimpressive over the recent years,” said Berezovets. “The major parties failed to get the key trend – the society’s demand for renovation and working social elevators. Candidates and parties didn’t create anything worth attention. And the voters saw it.”
While the ruling parties showed declining support, the election marked the return of many former supporters of Yanukovych, who left Party of Regions after the fall of its leader in 2014.
Before the election, a group of activists led by lawmaker Andriy Levus reviewed the party lists in 11 regions of the country and counted the former Yanukovych supporters who are running with the democratic parties.
According to that survey, Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc was the most welcoming for the former Yanukovych supporters – it accepted 120 of them. Two newly formed parties, Nash Kray (Our Land) and Vidrodzhennya (Revival) had 102 and 57 former Party of Regions members respectively. Analysts and politicians often refer to both parties as the undercover shelters for former Yanukovych cronies.
The official successor of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the Opposition Bloc, received a significant support in Dnipropetrovsk, with the party winning around 30 percent in the city council. Its representative, Oleksandr Vilkul, showed the second best result in the mayoral race. In the runoff, he will face Borys Filatov, a local businessman supported by oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who has had conflicts with the government over jointly owned assets and is seen as an undesirable figure for Poroshenko.
Nevertheless, Poroshenko’s Bloc didn’t offer a strong candidate for the Dnipropetrovsk race. Instead, it backed local lawmaker Maksym Kuryachiy, who ended up fourth in the race with only around 5 percent of the votes.
Dnipropetrovsk, along with port city Odesa and the western city of Uzhgorod, were identified by the Committee of Voters of Ukraine as the main hot spots in the Nov. 15 runoff.
Kyiv Post editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]
