Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko on Wednesday drove up tension ahead of Sunday's election, accusing her rival Viktor Yanukovich of preparing to rig the poll through last-minute changes to election rules.
Yanukovich’s Regions Party earlier pushed through parliament an amendment to electoral rules that will scrap the requirement for a quorum of representatives of both contenders to approve the count at individual polling stations.
"Parliament has passed changes to the law … which wreck an honest presidential election, make it false, dishonest, unregulated," Tymoshenko, the prime minister, said in a televised statement.
"This has been done because Yanukovich does not believe in his victory and he wants to get a result only through falsification," she said.
She urged President Viktor Yushchenko not to sign the electoral rule changes into law and said she had invited ambassadors from the Group of Eight countries to an urgent meeting later on Wednesday.
"I think that the president, who has spoken much about honest elections, is simply obliged to publicly refuse to sign the law," Tymoshenko later told a television chat show.
"His signature will be a death sentence on honest elections in Ukraine and, as a result, to democracy in Ukraine."
Tymoshenko and Yanukovich are set for a runoff vote for president on Sunday after a bitter campaign in which she has openly insulted him and he has accused her of systematic lying.
Both have traded accusations of attempts at rigging the election, but international poll monitors said a first round of voting last month was "clean" and instead criticised politicians’ "unsubstantiated" charges of large scale fraud.
RUSSIA AND EUROPE
The outcome of the election will be crucial for the ex-Soviet republic’s future relations with its former Soviet master, Russia, and its place in Europe.
It should also produce a government capable of resuming talks with the International Monetary Fund over a suspended $16.4 billion bail-out programme for the struggling economy.
The fiery Tymoshenko, 49, trailed Yanukovich by 10 percent in the first round of voting on Jan. 17. Although most observers say the outcome of Sunday’s election is too close to call.
Yanukovich, 59, a former prime minister who was disgraced in 2004 by mass protests called the "Orange Revolution" which denied him the presidency after a rigged election, is strong in the Russian-speaking east and south.
Tymoshenko, a leader in the "Orange Revolution", has strong support in the Ukrainian-speaking west and the centre. But her ratings have taken a hit as Ukraine sank deep into recession and analysts say her fate may depend on a strong turnout.
"I know the crisis has not brought us happiness in life and has added uncertainty, but it is a reality all around the world and so, the global crisis cannot be a reason for your state of being to lead you to not vote or to vote against everyone," she urged television viewers at the end of a chat show.
The Regions Party had argued that the quorum could be abused by Tymoshenko’s supporters if her representatives failed to turn up at the polling station, thus delaying the approval of the count or making it impossible altogether.
"Tymoshenko at the moment is in a difficult psychological state and again she is trying to find a way of falsifying the election…" Yanukovich told a local television station while on the campaign trail in the eastern city of Luhansk.
He said he expected Yushchenko to sign the amendments.
"I am certain President Yushchenko, who has also said many times that he is interested in carrying out honest elections in Ukraine, that he will sign it," Yanukovich told journalists. (Additional reporting by Natalya Zinets; writing by Richard Balmforth and Sabina Zawadzki, editing by Philippa Fletcher)
