Populist, pro-EU parties lead Ukraine parliamentary poll

The populist Radical Party of Ukraine would earn the most votes if parliamentary elections were held in the nearest future, according to a poll released on July 4 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. About 23 percent of decided voters said they’d cast their ballot for the Radical Party, followed by 17 percent for the Fatherland party and 13 percent for the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR), according to the poll, which was conducted between June 20 and July 2 among 2,040 respondents in all the regions of Ukraine except Crimea.

The Solidarity party, which was created by the current president Petro Poroshenko and has solely existed on paper since 2001, earned only 6.2% of support of decided voters, or fifth place. The institute’s director, Volodymyr Paniotto, told the LigaBiznesInform news agency after the poll’s release that its client, who asked to remain anonymous, didn’t want the respondents to be made aware that Solidarity is affiliated with Poroshenko. If they had been aware, Solidarity would have probably finished first instead of fifth, Paniotto said.

The Party of Regions led by ex-president Viktor Vanykovych ranked ninth with only 2.9% of decided votes, which is not enough to enter parliament, according to the current legislation.

Zenon Zawada: All the top three parties in the poll are populist and solidly pro-EU. Moreover, the top two parties (not counting Solidarity) declared their support for NATO membership. Just as significant, the only pro-Russian force, the Communist Party of Ukraine, has only 4.9 percent among decided voters. So the poll reveals that Ukraine has solidly embraced the European integration foreign policy course, with no threat of falling back into the Russian orbit, except in the event of a military occupation.

Poroshenko has yet to determine whether he will launch the Solidarity project or team with UDAR, as he did for the May presidential election. We expect that the popularity of the Solidarity party (and possibly the UDAR party, if they unite) will be directly related to the success of the government’s anti-terrorist operation and much of the millions of pro-EU votes are his to lose. Poroshenko’s political future is directly dependent on his ability to resolve the Donbas war by the summer’s end.