Tymoshenko maintains wide lead in presidential race

Former prime minister and political prisoner Yulia Tymoshenko
continues to enjoy a wide lead in the 2019 presidential election campaign,
according to the latest poll published on Nov. 13. Of those polled who intend
to vote, 20.7% said they will cast their ballot for the populist Tymoshenko,
11.4% will cast a protest vote for comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and 10.3% for
President Petro Poroshenko. The president also has the highest negative rating,
with 51.4% of those polled saying they will not vote for him under any
conditions, compared to 27.5% against Tymoshenko.

If parliamentary elections were held this weekend, six
parties would qualify, with pro-Western parties earning 58% and
Russian-oriented parties gaining 9.2%, the poll indicated. The newly launched
pro-Russian Nashi party has 4.9%, nearly enough to qualify for parliament. The
poll was conducted by the Razumkov Center, the Kyiv International Institute of
Sociology and the Rating Sociological Group between Oct. 19 and Nov. 2
involving 10,000 respondents.

Zenon Zawada: This poll
confirms that Ukrainians are chiefly concerned with economic issues, which
Tymoshenko has championed. Meanwhile, Poroshenko has yet to gain any serious
political dividends from his campaign to gain canonical recognition for the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate. We still can’t take the Zelenskiy
candidacy seriously until he starts actively campaigning. Therefore, the poll
also confirms the widely held view that the second-round runoff will be between
Tymoshenko and Poroshenko.