Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetskiy won re-election in the May 25 pre-term mayoral election and his eponymous bloc won the most seats in the Kyiv City Council.
Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetskiy won re-election in the May 25 pre-term mayoral election and his eponymous bloc won the most seats in the Kyiv City Council, which will likely enable it to form the majority coalition.
The convincing victory, in which the mayor earned 38 percent and almost doubled the results posted by runnerup Oleksandr Turchynov of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, served to reaffirm Chernovetskiy’s tenure and political agenda, widely criticized by his opponents as selfserving and corrupt.
“I gave Kyivans a part of my heart,” Chernovetskiy told a live national television audience the night of his victory. “The Kyiv elections are entirely not elections in some village. It’s a completely different audience. Kyivans understood me and they considered me.”
Chernovetskiy’s supporters said the mayor raised wages for civil servants, improved government services and accelerated infrastructure projects.
Critics alleged the mayor engaged in rampant corruption, particularly in illegal land distributions, and an atmosphere that allowed developers to trample upon the city’s historical heritage and landmarks.
Chernovetskiy’s top competitor was Turchynov, whose Tymoshenko Bloc led the effort to unseat the incumbent by voting for preterm elections in Ukraine’s parliament in midMarch.
However as political analysts predicted, the antiChernovetskiy vote was largely split between Turchynov, who earned 19 percent, and Vitali Klitschko, who earned 18 percent.
Some voters said they cast their ballot for either Klitshcko or Turchynov, and their respective blocs, as the political force they thought had the best chance to overcome Chernovetskiy.
“I wanted to vote for Turchynov, but I didn’t do that because of the influence of election polls,” said Valentyna Diudenko, 65. “I thought Klitschko would get more votes then Turchynov, so I voted for him.”
Meanwhile, the Chernovetskiy Bloc earned 30 percent of the vote and will likely form the governing coalition.
Though the Tymoshenko Bloc captured 23 percent of the vote and the Vitali Klitschko Bloc earned 11 percent, three of the four other qualifying political forces are expected to join the Chernovetskiy Bloc, political observers said.
They include the Volodymyr Lytvyn Bloc (8 percent), the Chernovetskiyaffiliated Civic Action of Kyiv (6 percent) and the Party of the Regions of Ukraine (4 percent).
Chernovetskiy Bloc leaders declined to discuss any coalitionforming plans until Kyiv’s Territorial Election Commission announced official election results, expected on May 28.
The 2008 mayoral elections were among the fiercest in Ukrainian independence, in which the competitors employed various unethical and underhanded tactics.
Though vote falsifications, which prompted the Orange Revolution three years ago, weren’t a concern this time around, attempts to buy votes were alarmingly widespread, throwing the Orange Revolution’s progress towards democracy into question.
“The main violation during preterm elections in Kyiv was technologies, which can be interpreted as attempts at buying voters,” reported the Westernfinanced Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), an election monitoring organization.
“Buying voters actively took place two weeks before elections and continued into Election Day.”
The vote count took place freely and transparently, the CVU reported, without reports of falsification. However, “investigation results can raise the issue of canceling the results if it’s proven that the candidate, or his trusted officials, are proven to be organizers of the votebuying schemes,” the CVU reported.
While votes were being bought, Chernovetskiy took his abuse of government resources to new heights, manipulating every form of state media to promote his own candidacy.
Chernovetskiy focused on key issues that struck a cord with his voters, a large segment of which are pensioners and poor citizens who depend on social payments from the government.
He advertised his success in boosting pensions and civil service wages, promising further increases, as well as alleged improvements in providing governmentsubsidized housing.
Since his March 2006 election as mayor, Chernovetskiy was preparing for an election campaign and built his war chest gradually, said Taras Berezovets, director of the Polittech consulting firm, which had Our Ukraine and the Tymoshenko Bloc as its clients.
“The campaign was very wellfinanced and basically began with unequal conditions, as only Chernovetsky’s team had been preparing for this campaign for two years”, said Berezovets. “All the rest of teams had to join later.”
However one upstart project, the Mykola Katerynchuk Bloc, proved a success, earning 3.5 of percent of the vote, claiming to have spent only $167, 000 in its campaign.
Election law forbids more than $100, 000 in campaign spending, yet experts estimated that candidates spent more than $200 million on the election.
The new faces that appeared in Kyiv election, such as Katerynchuk and Viktor Pylypyshyn, will form election lists in the next parliamentary elections and will participate in the 2010 presidential election, said Ihor Popov, the CVU chair.
Any attempts to overturn the elections by Chernoetskiy’s opponents are unlikely, he said.
Proof would have to emerge showing voters were bought, or that election and votecounting procedures were violated in at least 25 percent of districts.
Neither through campaigning, nor legal means, could Chernovetskiy be conquered.
“The campaign against him wasn’t poorly organized, but he was simply invulnerable to his electorate,” Berezovets said. “We checked with focus groups and whatever we told people, whatever arguments we used, that he steals land, nothing worked.”
