There aren’t many elections where all sides come out happy, but this arguably just happened in Ukraine this Sunday.
The authorities were already happy a
month or two before the elections, because they were confident of
victory by fair means and (mainly) foul. So they could afford to ease
off in the final weeks of the campaign. On the one hand, the ruling
Party of Regions didn’t get many of the results it wanted – most notably
failing to win a single seat in Kyiv. In one suburban capital seat the
far right Freedom party was able to declare victory over the acting
millionairess mayor Halyna Hereha after a three-day struggle over the
count. Other surprises included the victory for the candidate backed by
the “semi-detached” oligarch Viktor Pinchuk against a real regime
insider in Dnipropetrovsk. The Party of Regions didn’t sweep the board
in the territorial constituencies, where it once talked of winning 150
seats.
