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Ukraine elections to send seven parties to parliament, according to poll

Ukraine elections to send seven parties to parliament, according to poll

23 October 2014

The Petro Poroshenko Bloc will gain more than 30 percent of the vote in Sunday’s early parliamentary elections, according to a poll released on Oct. 22 that was conducted by the Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Fund and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. In all, seven parties can expect to qualify for parliament, including Oleh Liashko’s Radical Party (13%), the People’s Front (11%), the Self-Reliance party (8.5%), the Fatherland Party (7.5%), the Opposition Bloc (6%), and Strong Ukraine (6%). The poll was conducted between Oct. 9 and 18 of 2,025 respondents.

 

The Fatherland party won’t join the opposition after the elections, said on Oct. 22 its head and founder, Yulia Tymoshenko. “I am ready to help the president, prime minister and government in all their affairs and I absolutely say now with certainty that Fatherland won’t be in the opposition in the new parliament,” she told the Shuster Live talk show. “We are joining the democratic coalition.” Tymoshenko also called for a referendum on Ukraine’s entry into NATO to be conducted on election day, with her party having collected the necessary 3 million signatures. “The president has the right to issue a decree on holding an all-Ukrainian referendum and the president has all the opportunity to print these ballots with a single question in one night,” she said.

 

Three exit polls will be conducted on election day, two of which will be performed by Ukrainian polling firms and the third by an international coalition that includes a Ukrainian firm, a Lithuanian firm, the government of Canada and the U.S.-based International Republican Institute.

 

Zenon Zawada: Of the seven parties projected to qualify, we would say that five of them are populist and oligarch-aligned. The Opposition Bloc is a Putinist force and we only see the Self-Reliance party as a force committed to the tectonic change that the president has called for. Yet we don’t expect the moderate members of Self-Reliance to enter the opposition.

 

So based on these poll results, the emerging alignment in parliament will consist of the pro-presidential, oligarch-aligned majority, with the Opposition Bloc playing the role of the pro-Russian opposition and the Radical Party as possibly the populist opposition.

 

What’s also worth particular attention is that 32% of poll respondents said they haven’t decided on what party or candidate to vote for. Therefore, the actual results can sharply differ from these poll figures. The exit polls will play a particularly important role in confirming the results.

 

Tymoshenko is credible when she says she wants her party to enter the coalition. Yet she’s is the type of politician who will pull her force out of the coalition once an advantageous opportunity presents itself. Not only is she not loyal to Poroshenko, but she has a deep history of rivalry with him. So Fatherland is a force that could join the populist opposition should things go wrong for Poroshenko. We view her NATO referendum drive as a populist, election campaign maneuver.

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