Businessman and MP Leonid Chernovetsky rolls over incumbent and longtime rival Oleksandr Omelchenko
Kyiv has got its first new mayor in a decade, following the March 26 upset of 67-year-old incumbent Oleksandr Omelchenko by his longtime rival, Leonid Chernovetsky, a businessman and member of Parliament.
With over 80 percent of the ballots counted on March 29, Chernovetsky had 32 percent of the vote, well ahead of former heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko (23 percent) and Omelchenko (21 percent), despite long-running polls showing a different picture.
A poll conducted by Ukrainian Sociological Service between March 9 and March 16 showed Omelchenko ahead with 26 percent of the vote, followed by Klitschko, who represented a coalition between the center-right Pora-Reforms and Order Party with 17 percent, and Chernovetsky, with only 16 percent.
However, as Ukrainian Sociological Service Director Oleksandr Vyshniak pointed out, 27 percent of the city’s 2 million voters were still undecided at the time.
In January 2006, Omelchenko had enjoyed 37 percent of popular support, while Chernovetsky had only 11 percent.
In the end, according to Vyshniak, only 1.3 million Kyivans voted in the mayoral elections on March 26, which is higher than usual.
“Chernovetsky’s rating grew sharply in the last few days before voting,” said Svetlana Kononchuk, a political analyst at the Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research, who headed Klitschko’s press service during the campaign.
According to her, Chernovetsky did well because he represented change and has built up a reputation as a local philanthropist.
“A lot has changed since the Orange Revolution, but Kyiv has stayed the same,” said Kononchuk.
“Omelchenko was associated in the minds of voters with pre-Maidan,” she said referring to the capital’s main square where the 2004 Orange revolution was centered.
Kyiv is considered an Orange city and Omelchenko was supportive of the revolution. Although he ran as an independent, Omelchenko was offered a place on lists of leading national parties, including the bloc of Viktor Yanukovych, who lost the presidency as a result of the Orange Revolution.
Between January and March, the mayor’s office was rocked by a major housing scandal, in which 1,500 apartment buyers were bilked out of around $100 million by a company called Elite-Center. The city is responsible for issuing construction permits.
As for Klitschko, who simultaneously lost a bid for the national parliament and is widely considered a prot?g? of Omelchenko, who often the boxer’s bouts, Kononchuk said he started the race too late.
“The campaign wasn’t long and people hadn’t gotten used to him yet.”
Klitschko, who ran on an anti-corruption platform, launched his political career immediately after giving up his title.
But appearing at a press conference on March 27 days before Chernovetsky’s victory had been confirmed, Klitschko hugged the new mayor elect and congratulated him on his victory.
“You have to know how to win and how to lose,” said Klitschko.
“I think that my victory is a big present for Ukraine, because I don’t want anything for myself personally, and you all will be convinced of this soon,” Chernovetsky was quoted as saying.
During the same press conference, Chernovetsky took a call on his mobile phone, which he announced was from the president’s office, congratulating him on his victory.
The next day, President Viktor Yushchenko’s press service released a statement denying that it contacted Chernovetsky, explaining that it would wait for the final results.
Chernovetsky is 29th on the pro-presidential Our Ukraine’s party list, which means he is guaranteed a seat in parliament as well.
A pious mayor?
Trained as a lawyer, Chernovetsky is also a self proclaimed Christian activist.
“He (Chernovetsky) is very committed to the truth,” said Adelaja Sunday, senior pastor at the Embassy of God, a Kyiv-based evangelical church.
“He’s been a member of our church for the last 10 year,” said Sunday, adding that they work together to feed over a thousand people a day.
“We supply the people and he supplies the money.”
Widely reputed to control Ukraine’s Pravex-Bank, which is ranked 22 in terms of net assets, which total 400m dollars, Chernovetsky would be well placed to do this.
Sunday said that the homeless and alcoholics that his church helps may not have been influential in the March 26 vote, but other city residents who have heard of the charity work were.
According to Sunday, the Embassy of God has 25,000 regular members in Kyiv, but boasts 250,000 “affiliates” altogether.
Chernovetsky is also no stranger to politics. Months before the tumultuous presidential race that brought Yushchenko to power in 2004, Chernovetsky was included on the party list.
Just months before this, he had made headlines both for trying to unseat Omelchenko using the courts – an attempt which proved unsuccessful – and for his links to the deaths of two Kyiv pedestrians near his residence in the upscale Koncha Zaspa region outside Kyiv. Both of the pedestrians died on separate occasions in incidents on the road leading to Chernovetsky’s mansion in the elite Koncha Zaspa residential neighborhood. They were run over in 2003 at high speeds by cars linked to Chernovetsky, who happens to be a collector of expensive souped-up automobiles. He was behind the wheel in the second incident; his wife was a passenger in the first. Neither Chernovetsky nor his driver has been found guilty of any wrongdoing in connection with the incidents.
“In my opinion, it wasn’t so much that Chernovetsky won as that Omelchenko lost,” said Yevhen Poberezhny, executive director of the Ukrainian Committee of Voters, which monitored Ukraine’s elections.
Fresh faces
Chernovetsky and his team didn’t just do well in the mayoral race but in the election to the city’s 120 seat city council.
The Yulia Tymoshenko bloc is expected to get the lions share of council seats, around 33 percent, and according to Dmytro Vydrin, an analyst for the bloc, a coalition is being planned.
“He’s a good politician and businessman, and we have worked well with him in parliament … I think that relations with him on the city council will be good,” Vydrin said.
Chernovetsky’s bloc is expected to come in second place, followed by Our Ukraine, Vydrin said adding that Mykhailo Brodsky, a whistle blowing political figure who merged his party’s into Tymoshenko’s last year, would head the city council. During the 2004 presidential poll, Brodsky showed up at the Central Electoral Commission in a street cleaner to file his candidacy. Brodsky has also been one of the most outspoken critics of Tymoshenko’s political opponents.
Pollsters were more accurate regarding the future composition of the city council, predicting that Tymoshenko’s bloc would take almost 40 of 120 seats, followed by Our Ukraine and the Regions. Chernovetsky, a fierce opponent of Omelchenko, was considered a wild card.
Omelchenko’s Unity Party had only 15 seats on council, which was recently beefed up from 80 seats, but still maintained considerable influence.Not only do council members have influence in decisions involving issuance of land plots and granting approval to lucrative real estate projects, following controversial legislation that Yushchenko was forced to sign last year, city councilmen are immune from prosecution.
