Inna Bohoslovska, formerly one of the top lawmakers in the Party of Regions led by disgraced former President Viktor Yanukovych, announced she would participate in the next presidential elections in March 2019.
She announced it on July 26 through a video statement on Facebook.
Bohoslovska, 57, said she wanted to bring order to Ukraine and open the door to power for the young people.
“I’m ready to become an icebreaker and warm up with my heart this ice, and melt it,” Bohoslovska said in the video statement.
It wouldn’t be the first presidential election for Bohoslovska. She ran in 2010 and scored only 0.41 percent of all votes, coming 10th among 18 candidates. The winner in that election was Yanukovych.
Bohoslovska has been in politics since 1998, when she first got elected into parliament. She joined Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in 2007, left it in 2009 and rejoined a year later.
Bohoslovska was one of the top members of the party, frequently appearing on TV on its behalf.
She quit the Party of Regions on Nov. 30, 2013, after riot police attacked anti-government protesters, many of them students, on Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square in the middle of the night. The attack caused an outrage and rejuvenated the protest, which became the EuroMaidan Revolution and eventually ousted Yanukovych in February.
After that, Bohoslovska didn’t get re-elected for parliament.
Political consultant Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta Center for Political Studies, says Bohoslovska is unlikely to top her 2010 result.
“The situation for her is further exacerbated since she failed to win over the voters of the Party of Regions, (its successor) the Opposition Bloc, as well as (Vadim) Rabinovich’s,” says Fesenko. “And she also never managed to attract those voters who supported the EuroMaidan Revolution. Therefore, she is liked by no one.”
Fesenko, a long-time consultant for Ukrainian politicians, claims Bohoslovska “sincerely hates” Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of the Batkivshchyna Party who leads the presidential polls now, and that it might be one of the reasons for her to run.
But Fesenko does not exclude the possibility that Bohoslovska could be used as a technical candidate to take the votes from other candidates, such as Tymoshenko and President Petro Poroshenko, who is yet to announce his bid for re-election but is widely believed to be preparing to run.
