In the history of the parliamentary election campaigns in Ukraine, this one could be the hastiest.
Seven weeks before the July 21 election, the political field is still full of undecided players, politicians who are yet to join any party, and new parties hurriedly recruiting members.
Time is tight: Parties need to finalize the candidates on the ballot by June 20.
For new parties, it also means finding representatives to run in some 220 single-member districts around the country.
Voice, a new party started by popular singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, said they wouldn’t post their representatives in every district and, as of May 28, were 80 percent done with forming their list of candidates.
Servant of the People, the newly-created party of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, lags behind. It is leading in the polls with over 40-percent support, but is looking for single-member district nominees online. It will be accepting applicants until June 2.
Other new players appear to be even less prepared for the election.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who is remaining in his job because the parliament didn’t accept his resignation on May 30, revealed the name of his new party: Ukrainian Strategy. So far, the name is nearly all there is to know about it.
Meanwhile, some old players are struggling to reinvent themselves.
Poroshenko rebrands
After losing his re-election bid to Volodymyr Zelenskiy in April, ex-President Petro Poroshenko wants to take his party to parliament and work in opposition to Zelenskiy.
Yet, for now, it doesn’t look like Poroshenko will claim a lot of seats in the Verkhovna Rada: his party is supported by just 8.8 percent of decided voters, according to the latest poll by the Rating Group.
It means that Poroshenko’s party could take some 25 seats in a parliament of 423 people. It may also add several lawmakers from the single-member districts, where half of the parliament is elected. It will still be a far cry from the dominant position that the Poroshenko Bloc has held in the current parliament, where it has 130 seats thanks to the party’s success in the 2014 election.
In its nearly five years in power, Poroshenko Bloc’s members got into multiple scandals and faced many accusations of corruption. To lessen the burden of the past five years, Poroshenko announced a rebranding of his party. It will run for parliament as European Solidarity.
The party’s new name highlights Poroshenko’s main offer: a strong Western vector for the country’s development, with an ultimate goal of joining the European Union and NATO. In the Ukrainian language, European Solidarity has the same abbreviation as the EU.
“It’s an updated party with an updated leadership,” said Poroshenko at the party meeting on May 24.
European Solidarity will present its list of candidates at the party convention on May 31.
Meanwhile, a couple of top lawmakers announced they were leaving Poroshenko’s party. Ihor Kononenko, Poroshenko’s top partner in business and politics, said he supports the party but is leaving it “to give way to younger politicians.”
Ex-President Petro Poroshenko speaks at the forum of his party members and supporters on May 24, 2019 in Kyiv. Poroshenko announced his party, Petro Poroshenko Bloc, will be running in the July 21 election under a new name, European Solidarity. (Mikhail Palinchak)
Although Kononenko didn’t comment on his election plans, they are hardly a secret. For more than a year, Kononenko has been frequenting the single-member election district No. 94, an area in Kyiv Oblast with its center in Obukhiv, a city of 33,000 people less than 50 kilometers away from the capital. There, Kononenko has been giving away presents for the population — which once included bath towels emblazoned with his name — and ceremonially opening new and renovated facilities, such as school football fields. Often, he benefited from his position as a lawmaker, opening objects paid for from the state budget, as if he were the sponsor.
After more than a year of it, most believe Kononenko will run for parliament in the district.
Another top member fleeing Poroshenko’s ranks is Oleksandr Hranovskiy, a lawmaker famed for being well-connected among judges and prosecutors. Hranovskiy left the party and announced he would run for parliament as an independent candidate in a single-member district in Kharkiv.
He told ZIK TV he chose Kharkiv because “it’s a complicated electoral district where it’s impossible for those in power to rig the vote.” At the same time, Kharkiv’s long-serving Mayor Hennadiy Kernes said it was him who offered Hranovskiy to run in Kharkiv.
Celebrities on a roll
Celebrities are trending in this election. The examples of comedian and actor Zelenskiy, who won the presidency, and singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, who is running for parliament with a new party, Holos (Voice), have inspired other show business stars to consider a political career — or at least to get some publicity out of the election.
Viktor Pavlyk, one of the best-known pop stars in Ukraine in the 1990s, told news website LB.ua that he was negotiating to run for parliament. However, his party of choice is Stabilnist, a party started by Vasyl Zhuravlyov, a beginner politician from Mariupol. It is so little-known that polling agencies haven’t even been including it in the polls.
2019 parliamentary election: Key dates
May 24 — Election campaign officially starts.
June 20 — Deadline for parties to submit their list of candidates to the Central Election Commission. Deadline for candidates running in single-member districts to register for the election.
June 25 — The last day when the Central Election Commission can deny registration of a candidate or a party.
July 2 — Deadline for the Central Election Commission to publish the official list of candidates running in single-member districts.
July 8 — Deadline for candidates and parties to withdraw from the election.
July 10 — All registered voters in Ukraine should receive through mail an invitation to vote by this date.
July 13 — Deadline for foreign countries and international organizations to apply to monitor the election. Also, all ballots must be printed by this date.
July 15 — Deadline for voters to apply to change their assigned place of voting.
July 18 — Last day when polls can be published.
July 19 — Last day of campaigning.
July 20 — “Silence Day.” Campaigning is prohibited.
July 21 — Election Day.
Aug. 5 — Deadline to announce the results of the election.
Sources: Central Election Commission, Ukrainian law “On Electing Members of Parliament”
Some celebrity names can pop up in the ranks of Vakarchuk’s party. The party’s chief of staff, Yulia Klymenko, told the Kyiv Post that they are in negotiations with some celebrities to join. She didn’t reveal their names but said these are people already involved in activism.
Meanwhile, Olga Polyakova, a flamboyant pop singer omnipresent on Ukrainian television, said on May 29 that she wanted to start an all-women political party.
“We live in a country where men set the rules. Does it help our country? Why are we tolerating the roles they assigned us?” Polyakova said at the Women’s Partnership Forum in Kyiv on May 29.
She added, though, that she won’t have the party assembled in time for the July 21 election.
Lack of women
As far as the pop singer Polyakova stands from politics, she is right about the fact that women are under-represented in the Ukrainian parliament.
In fact, while women constitute more than half of the Ukrainian population, they form less than 12 percent of the parliament. In that regard, Ukraine ranks last in Europe and 156th out of 193 countries globally, according to the Ukrainian office of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, or IFES, an international non-profit supporting elections in new and emerging democracies.
So IFES called on the parties running for parliament to include more women in their lists of candidates.
“At an absolute minimum, two women in every five candidates on the list,” the May 28 IFES statement reads.
Even that, however, would only bump the number of women in parliament to approximately 20 percent.
To increase it further, IFES called on the parties to nominate women candidates in “winnable” single-member districts, which generate half of the parliament.
In the current parliament, out of 198 lawmakers elected in single-member districts, only four are women.
