Editor's note: The following is a statement from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
President Petro Poroshenko set an early parliamentary election for Oct. 26, a right the current version of the Constitution gives him in the case when a parliamentary coalition fails to form within 30 days after breaking. Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform and Svoboda quit the coalition on July 24.
“I
have decided to stop early the powers of the Verkhovna Rada of the
seventh convocation,” Poroshenko said in his decree issued late on
Aug. 25. He said the elections will be held on the last Sunday of
October.
Poroshenko
said he was issuing his decree “taking into account the
expectations of the majority of the people of Ukraine and to keep my
own word, which I gave while running for president.”
Apart
from an early election, Poroshenko also promised his voters that it
will be held based on open proportional system, as opposed to the
current parallel system, where half of 450 deputies are elected
through majority constituencies, while the other half – through
closed party lists, the creation of which happens behind closed
doors.
The
current composition of the deputies have failed to agree on new rules
for the early elections. However, the new parliament will have less
than 450 deputies because of annexation of Crimea by Russia. A new
law On temporarily occupied territories states that elections cannot
be held on such territories. It’s yet unclear what will happen in the
east of Ukraine, where war continues in some parts of Donetsk and
Luhansk region.
In
his speech on Aug. 25, Poroshenko said that the current composition
did not only “approve dictatorship laws that took away lives of the
Heavenly Hundred,” a reference to those who died during the
EuroMaidan revolution, but also that “many of the deputies who sit
or are listed in the Rada – if not direct sponsors and comrades,
then sympathizers of militant separatists.”
Poroshenko
said that a new election would be “the best form of lustration”
in his decree.
