For nearly 10 million voters, the Oct. 26 parliamentary elections became the day when they gave a clear mandate to pro-European political forces.
Four of such forces won 60 percent of the vote through the proportional system, and are negotiating to form a ruling coalition. Based on over 99 percent of votes counted, the winners are Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party, which got 22.16 percent, and President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc with 21.83 percent, followed by Samopomich (Self-Help) party led by Lviv mayor Andriy Sadoviy.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted on Oct. 27 that Ukrainians “have elected the most pro-European parliament in the country’s history.”
The first-place success of the People’s Front came as a surprise, said Iryna Bekeshkina, head of Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a think tank which conducted the only independent exit poll. She said the party’s campaign managed to explain that “if Ukrainians wanted to see Yatsenyuk as prime minister they should vote for the People’s Front.” In a pre-election survey, 34 percent of respondents said they wanted Yatsenyuk to remain as prime minister.
Vitaliy Bala, who heads the Situations Modeling Agency, says Yatsenyuk got the vote because Ukrainians “don’t want the president to have all the power in his hands.”
Six parties that have crossed the 5 percent threshold through the proportional system will carve up 225 seats in the parliament that officially has 450 seats. Representatives of other parties, as well as an assortment of independent candidates, will take the remaining seats, with the exception of 27 seats in the constituencies where elections were not held because of the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s invasion of Donbas.
Poroshenko’s party is slated to have 132 seats in parliament along with candidates elected in single-seat districts, while the People’s Front expects to have 83 deputies. Together, that’s just 10 seats short of the majority.
Other parties that made it in are the Opposition Bloc, Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party and Batkivshchyna. The right-wing Svoboda Party will have limited representation after winning six seats in several majority constituencies.
The Communist Party was voted out completely, for the first time since independence.
The elections saw new faces enter from civil society, including among journalists, and combatants fresh from the warfront in Donbas get elected. However, only 47 women made it to the parliament, compared to 43 in 2012.
According to election watchdog OPORA, 151 incumbent lawmakers won re-election on major party lists and in single-seat districts. There are some 64 former lawmakers who adopted the draconian Jan. 16 laws that severely curbed civil liberties at the height of the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
