DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine – The city center is plastered with politicalparty advertisements and paid election campaigners stand on nearly everycorner eager to hand out their literature.
Tempers are running high in this city of almost 1 million located 480 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, where two former governors will compete for power in the Oct. 25 local elections.
One of them, Oleksandr Vilkul, a former ally of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, is running for mayor on Opposition Bloc’s ticket. The other is oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky who’s backing his nominee Borys Filatov, a businessman with a reputation for corporate raiding, for mayor from the Ukrop party.
Both have extensive financing and media resources. Some voters fear the candidates may employ paramilitary fighters. There are the hired thugs, who Filatov claims that Vilkul used against the local Euromaidan supporters. On the other side, people fear that Kolomoisky may draw support from the volunteer fighters he sponsored in the Donbas.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has singled out Dnipropetrovsk as a “hot spot” on polling day.
“There has never been such a serious competition for the post of mayor,” said Stanislav Zholudev, head of the Dnipropetrovsk branch of Committee of Voters of Ukraine and an election observer in the city since 1998.
Dnipropetrovsk is one of the most prosperous cities in the country, with a yearly budget of $246 million. And if parliament passes the de-centralization bill in the second reading, this will increase.
But this campaign isn’t just about who controls the budget. This is an opportunity to cement a new political hierarchy in the post-Euromaidan era.
Vadym Karasiov, a political analyst and the director of the Kyiv-based Institute of Global Strategy, said the pro-presidential party Petro Poroshenko Bloc purposely put forward a weak candidate in order to advance Vilkul and prevent Kolomoisky’s candidate, Filatov, from winning.
Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, was appointed by Poroshenko to be Dnipropetrovsk governor in March 2014. He left the post a year later following a dispute with the government over the control of energy assets.
With the stakes so high in Dnipropetrovsk, observers and candidates fear that mass election violations and even violence will occur on polling day.
“We have information that the graduates of the Physical Education Institute have been asked to work on Sunday night (Election Day) by the Opposition Bloc… They might be used to physically influence the (Election) Commission,” Oleksandr Sanzhar, manager of Ukrop’s campaign in Dnipropetrovsk told the Kyiv Post on the phone. He added that Ukrop representatives were preparing to “hold them back.”
The Opposition Bloc refused to comment for this story.
Kolomoisky reportedly sponsors and controls several volunteer battalions, the most well-known being Dnipro-1. Some armed men have already been seen at the meetings of election officials in Dnepropetrovsk in September.
“Everything will depend on the (Election) Commission and whether or not Kolomoisky feels pushed into a corner,” said Denys Davydov of Opora Dnipropetrovsk, an election watchdog.
Zholudev of CVU thinks violence is probable.
“The trouble is that everyone is uniting against Kolomoisky… I don’t know if he wants all-out violence in Dnipropetrovsk but he has enough power to do it,” he said.
Kolomoisky built his banking and energy empire from his native Dnipropetrovsk and throughout the years has used it, with much success, to force Kyiv into compromise.
During his governorship he was popularly praised for preventing the spread of Kremlin-sponsored separatism in the region that borders with Donetsk Oblast, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the political elites moving against him.
“This conflict is so principled that no side will back down,” said Zholudev. “It is the central city for Privat (Kolomoisky’s people) so they won’t give it up and Vilkul won’t give it up because Dnipropetrovsk (city) is the only part of the oblast that he doesn’t control”.
The available mayoral election polls are dismissed by local political experts as biased but most agree that there is no single candidate who will receive the 50 percent necessary to win in the first round.
According to Zholudev, Vilkul will advance to the second round because he is guaranteed around 30 percent of the vote from former supporters of the Yanukovych’s party and now banned Communist Party.
“I am worried there might be violence. It could start with peaceful protests and end with titushki (paid thugs),” said Zholudev. “People won’t accept Vilkul as mayor because everyone knows what kind of person he is”.
Vilkul, who managed an iron ore company belonging to Rinat Akhmetov before entering politics, has a reputation that was badly tainted when under his governorship pro-EuroMaidan protesters were attacked by thugs in Dnipropetrovsk in January 2014. There have also been allegations made that he was involved in stoking separatism in eastern Ukraine.
But Vilkul’s unpopularity does not necessarily mean that people welcome his opponent Filatov or his backer Kolomoisky, particularly after his public spat with the government in Kyiv.
“It’s like choosing between the lesser of two evils,” said Ilya, who works as an entertainment presenter for various political parties in the campaign. Kyiv Post spoke to Ilya at a café in the city center but he declined to give his last name, fearing to lose his job.
Kyiv Post staff writer Isobel Koshiw can be reached at [email protected]
