Vitali Klitschko, WBC heavyweight boxing champion and a Ukrainian opposition leader has the biggest chance to enter a run-off presidential election against the current President Viktor Yanukovych if elections were held in February, a poll by the Rating sociological group found.
Klitschko,
the leader of Political Alliance for Reforms (UDAR) party, would gain 15.1
percent of votes, the second most after Yanukovych (25.1 percent) even if
ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who is serving a seven-year prison term for
abuse of office in a case the West sees as politically motivated, would be
able to run.
If
Tymoshenko would be able to run for president, she would
place third with 13.9 percent support. And should Tymoshenko not be allowed to run, Arseniy
Yatseniuk, the current leader of her Batkivshchyna political force, would come in third with 15 percent.
In both
cases Oleh Tiahnybok, leader of the Svoboda nationalist party would take fourth place (from 7 to 9 percent), the poll found.
Klitschko
expressed outrage when on Feb. 18 Yatseniuk claimed that the opposition was ready
to nominate the UDAR leader as candidate for Kyiv city mayor. Many observers
suspected this was a way for Yatseniuk to oust his political competitor.
“We didn’t
talk about this, have never discussed this issue,” Klitschko said, not
specifying if he had plans to announce his candidacy for the top post in Kyiv.
In a separate Rating group poll, interviewers asked respondents what political
party they would support if parliamentary elections were held in late
February. Even though the ruling Party of Regions still came in first, it lost a number of supporters, while the opposition increased in popularity, the poll found.
Joint
support for all three opposition parties has increased from a combined 50 percent they got in the October 2012 parliamentary election, to 56 percent in late February 2013. In turn, pro-government Party of Regions and Communist party saw combined support
sink from 43 percent to 38 percent.
The
sociologists say that the opposition gained voter support thanks to
parliamentary newcomers Klitschko’s UDAR and Tiahnybok’s Svoboda. The number of
Svoboda supporters increased from 10.4 percent to 11.9 percent of those who said they were ready to vote, while UDAR – from 14 percent to 18.1 percent.
However, Batkivshchyna separately decreased in popularity from 25.5 percent to 19.3. Party
of Regions, which on in the parliament election received 30 percent of
votes, would have gained 24.9 percent if elections were held in February.
Men mostly support UDAR and Svoboda, while women prevailed among those who
were ready to vote for Batkivshchina, Party of Regions and Communists.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be
reached at [email protected]
