Ukraine’s Most Important Election Is Sunday

[Rogue Valley]

Ukraine’s Most Important Election Is Sunday. Here's What to Expect

A man walks past an election campaign poster of Ukrainian Opposition Platform - For Life political party in Kyiv.

BY BRIAN MEFFORD

On July 21, Ukrainians go back to the ballot box to choose a new parliament. In April, voters made comedian and political novice Volodymyr Zelenskyy president. The outcome of Sunday’s parliamentary elections will determine Ukraine’s geopolitical course and policy choices over the next five years.

• Zelenskyy’s popularity is strong and his Servant of the People party will take a near majority. I expect it to win about 120 party-list seats and up to 100 seats in single-mandate districts. (A party needs 226 seats to form a majority.)

• The pro-Russian Opposition Platform/For Life party will finish in second with close to 15 percent. That percentage is almost identical to the ethnic Russian population in Ukraine. With potentially two dozen victories in single-mandate districts as well, Opposition Platform-For Life will have more than 60 MPs in the next parliament, making it the second largest faction. (My Note: This party was created by Ukraine oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk to do Putin's bidding)

• Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party has stopped hemorrhaging voters and will receive 8-10 percent. A couple dozen MPs from districts (both as independents and under the party label) will be elected to give the party around 50 MPs.

• Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party will return to parliament and win 7-9 percent. Combined with a few victories in single-mandate districts, she will command a faction of close to 30 MPs.

• Svyatoslav Vakarchuk’s Golos (Ukrainian = Holos) party will enter parliament and may benefit from a late breaking surge. The initial enthusiasm that fueled the party from one percent to almost ten in some polls seems to have settled at just under seven percent. A last-minute bump would give Golos close to 40 MPs in the next parliament.

• Opposition Bloc is polling at 2.5 percent, which is only half of the support needed to enter parliament.

• At the start of the campaign, Civic Position (Anatoliy Hrytsenko), Radical Party (Oleh Liashko), and Strength and Honor (Ihor Smeshko) all seemed to be within striking distance of winning seats in parliament. At this point, all three are out of steam, and their support has either flat-lined or petered out. In addition, the Svoboda campaign has never taken off and Samopomich’s days in parliament are coming to an end. That is not to say a member of two of Svoboda or Samopomich won’t win in a district, but there will be no factions of these parties in the next parliament. (My Note: the above are either nationalist or far-right. Polling indicates none will capture any Parliament seats)

• Finally, the late surge in this campaign is from Prime Minister Volodymyr Groisman’s Ukrainian Strategy party, which is pushing four percent and has doubled in support over the last few weeks. If Ukrainian Strategy passes the threshold, it won’t be by much and it will have a mere dozen or more MPs in its faction.

I more or less agree with the above synopsis. Zelenskyy's party will need partners to form a viable governing coalition.

It is important to not allow Medvedchuk's For Life party any meaningful measure of power.

 

[Rogue Valley]

Ukraine Parliamentary election. Final national poll;

Servant of the People (Volodmyr Zelenskyy) - 49.5%
Opposition Platform (Viktor Medvedchuk) - 10.5%
European Solidarity (Petro Poroshenko) - 7.7%
Batkivshchyna (Fatherland/Yulia Tymoshenko) - 6.9%
Golos (Voice/Svyatoslav Vakarchuk) - 5.9%

Note: A political party needs to surpass a minimum 5% threshold to win parliamentary seats.

 

[Rogue Valley]

Today is Silent Saturday. No campaigning or TV/radio ads are allowed. Campaign posters will be taken down.

Tomorrow is the election. Except for single seat district elections, a political party must surpass the minimum 5% vote threshold to seat members in Parliament.

In the next parliamentary election in 5 years, there will be no party list candidates. Every candidate will run individually.

I hope the two candidates below make it. Previous MP's, they are running alone as independents and are very strong on reforms.

Sergii Leshchenko and Svitlana Zalishchuk

 

[Rogue Valley]

President Zelenskyy and his wife voted in the Obolon district of Kyiv.

Today is election day. I'll report here on the tentative results tomorrow morning.

Today by noon ~20% of the national votes have been cast, but it will get real busy now that Sunday church services are over.

 

[Rogue Valley]

Working the voting station at the embassy in Lithuania.

Voting station at the embassy in Mexico.


Tentative Parliamentary election results from the Central Election Commission:

Servant of the People - 42.33% (Zelenskyy - 248 seats)
Opposition Platform - For Life - 12.79% (Medvedchuk - 43 seats)
European Solidarity - 8.70% (Poroshenko - 27 seats)
Batkivshchyna Party - 8.08% (Tymoshenko - 25 seats)
Voice - 6.40% (Vakarchuk - 20 seats)

The remainder of the political party's did not achieve the minimum 5% threshold. No far-right or nationalist party candidates will be seated in Parliament.

I really don't like landslide results like the above. It places too much power in the hands of President Zelenskyy. Think of Donald Trump and the GOP majority House and GOP majority Senate. This does allow Zelenskyy to get things like reform done. However, it also presents an opportunity to solidify his political power for many, many years. It also allows Zelenskyy to end the war by accepting unfavorable terms.

 

[Rogue Valley]

If the tentative results hold up, Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party (Government) would have a super-majority of 248 seats. 226 are needed for a majority in parliament.

~87 seats remain to be decided in single mandate districts.

Even if none of these 87 seats were won by SOTP candidates (that won't happen), there is not enough opposition votes to block SOTP legislation. Not a good outcome for a healthy democracy.

 

[Rogue Valley]

The foreign election monitors report a fair election. The domestic election watchdog organization (OPORA) received 237 complaints and has referred 22 to the National Police.

95% of all ballots cast have been counted. This marks the lowest national turnout (49.9%) for a parliamentary election.

Women MP's will form 20% of the elected Parliament. That is +34 from 2014. A new record in Ukraine.


If nothing else, the presidential and parliamentary elections showed a demand for reform and change. Zelenskyy's leading initiatives include ending the war, returning Ukrainians held captive [in Russia], and defeating corruption. Among the first reforms to be considered will be a law to end the immunity of MP's from legal prosecution, and adding an amendment to the Constitution about the procedure for impeaching the president. By any metric, Ukraine is now a "presidential republic". Zelenskyy said he will attempt to form a coalition with Holos (Voice) for bills which require a two-thirds majority to pass. More than 60% of parliament seats will go to novice legislators. The older established parties in Ukraine (Poroshenko/Tymoshenko) may form an opposition coalition. The pro-Russia For Life party (a vestige of Yanukovych) polled ~13% which is only slightly better than 2014. The majority of these votes came from the war-torn east. All nationalist and/or far-right parties polled below the minimum 5% threshold - Svoboda (supported by the National Corps and the Right Sector) 2.2%, the far-right candidate Ruslan Koshulynskyi 1.6%. The Kremlin propaganda that Ukraine is run by Fascists/Nazis is once again utterly destroyed.

 

[Rogue Valley]

Jean Belenyuk with Volodmyr Zelenskyy.

In another first, Jean Belenyuk (31) has been elected an MP of the SOTP party.
Born in South Africa, Mr. Belenyuk is the first black to win a seat in the Verkhovna Rada.
He is an Olympic medalist in Greco-Roman wrestling and plans to compete at the Tokyo Olympics.

 

[Rogue Valley]

I suppose if there is one overarching takeaway from the elections this year, it would be that Ukrainians overwhelmingly wanted a fresh start.