Though the exit poll results from the nationwide proportional vote continues to grab headlines, the composition of Ukraine's future parliament will be determined by the single mandate districts. The ruling Party of Regions is expected to dominate these races, which the opposition contests warning of widespread fraud.
Already before the vote
experts pointed to the single mandate districts, which will account
for 225 seats of a total 450 in the new parliament, as being the key
determinant of Ukraine’s future government. According to experts,
these races are set to be won by a number of ruling party candidates
as well as nominally independent candidates who will later switch to
the Party of Regions.
“The elections will
effectively be decided in the 225 single-seat constituencies and we
expect the Party of Regions to dominate there. We estimate the ruling
party stands to take 100 out of the 106 seats allocated for its
heartland in the east and south of Ukraine and could even win enough
districts in the center and west to garner an outright majority
without relying on Communists or unaligned deputies,” Kyiv-based
investment bank Dragon Capital wrote in a note to investors on Oct.
22.
The investment bank
predicted the ruling Party of Regions could thus arrive at a grand
total of around 230 seats in the new parliament – enough to form a
majority without the need to really on their traditional allies, the
Communist Party of Ukraine.
This scenario was
confirmed on the night of the voting by Party of Regions faction
leader in the parliament Oleksandr Yefremov, who predicted his party
would take around 80 seats in the proportional vote, plus some 150 in
the single mandate districts.
Already the ruling party
has claimed victory in Kharkiv oblast.
“Our exit polls show the
absolute victory of our candidates… The
situation in the oblast is clear. I think
the results are all, without exception, well beyond 50 percent,
and that the nearest competitors
have two, three, four times lower (results).
The town (has witnessed) major confrontation,
but not enough to constitute real
competition to candidates from the Party of Regions,” said oblast
head Mykhailo Dobkin.
The closest race is within
the city itself, where Party of Regions candidate Valeriy Pysarenko
allegedly won 39.5 percent of the vote, while his opponent Ihor
Baluta got only 38 percent. According to a parallel vote count
organized by the opposition, however, Baluta received 38.4 percent of
votes, while Pysarenko got one percentage point less. Moreover, the
head of the opposition’s campaign Arsen Avakov pointed to
irregularities in the region’s voting.
“Voting at home this
season, in this election – broke all the records.
I want to tell you that in the last election 38,400 people voted from
home, and now it was 56,000. That’s
17,600 more,” Avakov told news agency
Interfax-Ukraine, adding that he noticed some suspicious instances,
including students showing up to vote with their teachers and a
surprising amount of “sick” voters undergoing miraculous
recoveries.
The Party of Regions
claims this is due to laxer legislation on home voting.
Former deputy prime minister Hryhoriy Nemyria, a
close jailed opposition leader and former Premier Yulia Tymoshenko,
said the election was not nearly as democratic as in previous years.
“Overall, the quality and standards of the elections of the last
90 days are below previous standards,”
Nemyria said. One of the chief problems, he added,
was the Central Elections Commission decision to publish only the
aggregated results for the 225 districts – not the 33,000 polling
stations around the country. “It creates a huge reservoir of
uncertainty,” Nemyria said.
In many such single
mandate districts, de facto ruling coalition candidates received
support in the form of administrative resources or high profile
endorsements. One such case was that of Prime Minister Mykola
Azarov’s son Alexei Azarov, who ran in the Donbass district of
Slavyanske. He did not respond to any Kyiv Post appeals to comment.
In the end, however, it
appears the rule of the Party of Regions is will be prolonged, and
the party will continue to exert stable control over Ukraine’s
political landscape.
“The
total result of the United
Opposition, Vitali Klitschko’s
UDAR party, and the nationalist
Svoboda is better than the combined result
of the ruling Party of Regions (PR) and the Communists. We
must remember, however, that the result will be enhanced Party
of Regions results from single mandate
constituencies, where – as I suspect – ruling
party candidates often running as
independents will clearly prevail. The
parliamentary majority for the ruling camp is not
compromised,” Adam Eberhardt, head
of leading Warsaw-based think tank the Center for Eastern Studies,
told Polish press after the vote.
Kyiv Post editor Jakub
Parusinski can be reached at [email protected]
