Opposition parties have chance of getting more than half of votes

Opposition parties could win more than half of votes in the parliamentary elections on Oct. 28, Director of the Penta Center for Applied Political Studies Volodymyr Fesenko has said.

"Three opposition parties [UDAR, Batkivschyna and Svoboda] could take about half of the vote," he said at a press conference in Kyiv on Friday.

He said that the struggle to get about 50% of the vote on the party lists of the opposition was very important, as it represents an application for the future presidential elections.

"This is to confirm that half of society is set to support the opposition, and it should be a symbolic prize for the opposition," Fesenko said.

The analyst's forecast was confirmed by the results of a survey conducted by the Rating Sociological Group and presented at the press conference.

According to this study, among those who intend to go to the polls, the Regions Party would receive 23% of the vote, UDAR - 17.9%, Batkivschyna - 16.5%, the Communist Party - 12.8%, Svoboda - 6%, Ukraine-Forward! Party - 3.1%, and Our Ukraine - 1%. The other parties would get less than 1% of the vote. Some 17.2% of respondents were undecided.

The founder of the Rating Sociological Group, Oleksiy Antypovych, said that UDAR, Batkivschyna and Svoboda would get over 40% of the vote, while the Regions Party and the Communist Party - 36%.

He said that taking into account the study, it is possible to conclude that the opposition parties could get 119 seats in a new parliament and the parties that are now part of the coalition - 106.

The survey was conducted from Sept. 25 to Oct. 5. A total of 2,000 respondents from all regions in Ukraine participated in the survey. The poll's margin of error is 2.2%.