You're reading: Results show Yanukovych allies, oligarchs staying alive

Five days after the Oct. 25 municipal elections, and with the vote count continuing at a snail's pace, some results of the landmark poll are gradually becoming clear.

The election showed that the parties now in power have lost ground, while opposition forces, including members of the pre-EuroMaidan Revolution political elite, are slowly regaining their positions.

As of Oct. 29, four days after the vote, only 30 percent of a total of 158,399 local council deputies had been officially declared elected. While the count is slowest for regional councils, the vote tallies in mayoral elections were also unrushed ­– only 3,796 mayors of cities and villages had been officially declared elected as this paper went to print, with the results of another 10,051 mayoral races still to be announced.

And for some cities the elections are still not over: 35 cities in Ukraine have over 90,000 voters, which means there will be a run-off if no one gets more than 50 percent of the vote. Just how many of these second-round votes will have to be held is as yet unknown.

The pro-government Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko seems to be one of the top three parties that won most seats in local councils across Ukraine, but its percentage of the vote in many oblasts is down on the result it gained in the parliamentary elections exactly a year ago.

At the same time, the party that gained the biggest share of the vote in the 2014 parliamentary election, the People’s Front led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, skipped this election: Yatsenyuk said he wanted to focus on his job as prime minister, but support for his party has dropped in the year since he became prime minister.

The Bloc of Petro Poroshenko failed to seize this opportunity to increase its support by picking up votes from supporters of Yatsenyuk’s party, however.

Return of old power
The other main outcome of the election was a rise in support for the parties of former allies of disgraced former President Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych’s Party of Regions had a majority in the parliament and was Ukraine’s strongest political force until February 2014, when its leader fled the country, ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution, and the party collapsed practically in a day.

Most of its members left the party – but not politics. They joined other parties and created new ones. Two of these new parties, Vidrodzhennya (Revival) and Nash Kray (Our Land), created in 2014 and 2015, have now won hundreds of seats in city and oblast councils.

An analysis of the party lists in 11 oblasts published before the election by lawmaker Andriy Levus shows that the two parties together have 159 former Party of Regions members. However, the Bloc of Poroshenko has the most politicians from the old regime now in its ranks – 120, according to the analysis.

The new parties also won seats in the city councils of several major cities.

Vidrodzhennya came first in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, according to an exit poll conducted by the Committee of Voters of Ukraine.

As of Oct. 29, Nash Kray was the second largest party, with 1,153 deputies elected to local councils around Ukraine.

The new parties might have done just as well if they’d made their associations with the old regime clear. The Opposition Bloc, the predominant successor of the Party of Regions, got many votes, too. In Dnipropetrovsk, the Opposition Bloc came first, winning over 30 percent of the votes for the city council. In central Ukraine’s Kirovograd Oblast, it won 19 percent of the vote in the regional council election, sharing first place with the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko. It also came third in the Odesa city council election.

While most of the power in the country is still held by the president and prime minister, the local councils now have more responsibilities. While they can’t pass local legislation, local councils are in charge of the cities’ most valuable asset – land. They can decide if for how much a company or individual can rent valuable city-owned land for 50 years – which often happens.

And local councils will have a bigger role in the future, as the further decentralization of power is a goal of the Ukrainian government and is demanded by its foreign creditors.

Mayors do well
Although the vote count is not finished yet, the results of the mayoral race in key cities are clear. Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipropetrovsk will have runoffs, where the two top candidates will compete for the job. Incumbent mayors Vitali Klitschko and Andriy Sadovy lead the races in Kyiv and Lviv, while in Dnipropetrovsk two candidates – backed by Ukraine’s two richest oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov – are neck-and-neck.

Kharkiv re-elected Hennadiy Kernes, its current mayor and a representative of the Vidrodzhennya party, with over 65 percent of the vote. The fact that Kernes is under criminal investigation for the alleged kidnapping of EuroMaidan activists didn’t dent his support.

In Odesa, the current mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov was re-elected. But Odesa Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili claimed there was vote fraud and demanded a recount and a runoff, in which Trukhanov would go against Saakashvili’s aide Sasha Borovik, who came second in the Oct. 25 poll.

Many violations
While many ordinary violations were reported on election day – including one where no voting booths were prepared, and voters had to fill out their ballot papers behind a curtain – the biggest cause of disruption on election day was the Central Election Commission.

In Pavlograd, a city in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, none of the mayoral candidates gained 50 percent of the vote, so the top two candidates – the current deputy mayor and a popular soldier with battle experience in the Donbas conflict – made it to the runoff.

But on Oct. 27, the Central Election Commission suddenly canceled the second round, saying that there are only 89,000 voters in Pavlograd, whereas runoffs are required only in cities with 90,000 voters or more. Before the election, the commission registered 90,295 voters in Pavlograd.

The decision meant that the deputy mayor, Anatoly Vershyna, a representative of the Opposition Bloc, was declared elected as mayor in the first round of voting.

The move was heavily criticized, even from within the Central Election Commission. Olga Aivazovska, the head of the Opora election watchdog, called it an unprecedented violation.

“It means that the election system was changed during the election. The history of elections in Ukraine has never seen legal nihilism like this,” Aivazovska said in a statement on her Facebook page.

After the scandal hit the media, the Kyiv Appeals Court ruled the decision of the commission illegal. A second round of voting for mayor will take place in Pavlograd on Nov. 15 – as in other cities with runoffs votes.

The authorities are yet to decide the fate of the elections in two other cities – Mariupol and Kramatorsk. Both are strategically important cities close to territories in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast where armed Russian-separatist groups have seized control. The elections in the two cities failed to take place on Oct. 25 due to claims the ballot papers were printed with errors.

Kyiv Post editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]