You're reading: Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy joins presidential race

The Samopomich Party has nominated its leader and Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy as the party’s candidate in the 2019 presidential elections.

The decision was approved on Jan. 3 at the party’s convention in Kyiv, officially launching the politician’s presidential campaign. Sadovy as far back as early October publicly announced he was planning to run for president.

Following the vote, Sadovy also presented his program and strategy for winning the presidential race.

According to Oleh Bereziuk, leader of the Samopomich faction in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, Sadovy’s agenda for the presidency has three major points — restoring the public’s trust in the authorities, fighting corruption by enforcing the rule of law, and modernizing the county’s infrastructure.

Sadovy also plans to ban all Russian individuals or businesses, or any offshore company, from investing in Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and industries, including gas, energy, and fuel supplies.

The party presented their candidate as the only opponent to the corrupt “oligarchic regime” in Ukraine and also as “a successful city mayor that has proved well able to create teams who can win.”

“President Sadovy will appoint a prosecutor general under whom stealing from budget will be impossible, so the budget will not lose hundreds of billions in customs offices and to offshores,” Samopomich lawmaker Tetyana Ostrikova said during the  convention.

“(He) will appoint a chief of (the Security Service of Ukraine), under which Russians will not possess Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, energy facilities, and mineral resources.”

Michel Tereshenko, the Paris-born mayor of the Sumy Oblast city of Glukhiv, who earlier announced his own candidacy for the presidency but later withdrew, also endorsed Sadovy’s candidacy.

Sadovy, a Lviv-based businessman and mayor of this city since 2006, registered the Samopomich (“Self-Help”) as a Western-oriented, moderately conservative Christian Democratic Party.

The party won 26 seats in the 2014 parliamentary elections.