Vitali Klitschko has been re-elected as mayor of Kyiv, the local election commission announced on Nov. 6.
Klitschko won 50.5%, or 365,161 votes, narrowly escaping a runoff.
Earlier, exit polls projected that Klitschko would receive just under 50% and would likely go into a runoff with Oleksandr Popov, who ran Kyiv as the head of the city administration under disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
The results were finally announced 12 days after the elections that took place on Oct. 25.
Klitschko is a retired heavyweight boxing champion and one of Ukraine’s most successful athletes, who fully switched to politics after 2010.
It will be his third term as mayor. He has held the office since 2014.
Kyiv election results
According to the official results, Klitschko will also have a strong backing in the city council, where his UDAR party received 30 out of 120 seats.
The UDAR party came second in the city council race, slightly behind the European Solidarity party led by former President Petro Poroshenko.
The local election commission announced that a total of seven parties have passed the 5% threshold required to take seats in the city council.
European Solidarity, which holds 27 seats in parliament, won with 20% of the vote, UDAR was supported by 19.5% of the voters, while the local Unity party, led by scandalous ex-Kyiv Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko, came in third with 8.7%.
The pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life party, which controls 44 lawmakers, received 7.8% of the vote, beating President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, which controls 246 seats in parliament, yet received only 7.5% in the Kyiv city election.
Opposition Platform – For Life party candidate Popov also came second in the mayoral race, with 9%, and would have advanced to the runoff had Klitschko received less than 50% of the vote.
Two parties represented in parliament, the Batkivshchyna party led by ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and the pro-European Voice party, have also made it into the city council with 7.5% and 6%, accordingly.
Klitschko’s rocky reputation
Klitschko’s popularity is a phenomenon. It hasn’t been shaken by corruption scandals and accusations of mismanagement that have followed him since he became mayor in 2014.
Before taking charge in Kyiv, Klitschko was a national politician. In the 2012 parliamentary election, his UDAR part came third. He was also one of the political leaders of the 2013-14 Euromaidan Revolution, which ousted pro-Russian President Yanukovych.
Klitschko was projected to make it into the runoff for the 2014 presidential elections. However, after negotiations, Klitschko endorsed Poroshenko for presidency, while he became the mayor of Kyiv.
His term in office was marred by suspicions of connections with developers, especially Maksym Mykytas and Vadym Stolar.
Under Klitschko’s watch, companies affiliated with Mykytas and Stolar won billions of hryvnia worth of construction tenders from the city of Kyiv, including for the Kyiv subway and Shulyavskiy Bridge.
Klitschko ignored concerns of violations by these companies. When a company led by Mykytas was developing a site too close to the Dnipro River in 2015, the city council saw no violations.
Klitschko has always denied he favored any developers or was influenced by them. But in 2017, he was spotted taking a private jet with Mykytas and Stolar. The mayor said the businessmen spontaneously offered him a lift and he paid his share.
Today, Stolar is a lawmaker with the pro-Russian Opposition Platform party. Mykytas is under arrest, charged with embezzlement. His UkrBud Development company went bankrupt and left 25 unfinished residential blocks and thousands of buyers waiting for their apartments, which the state will now pay to finish.
As for Klitschko, affiliations with developers didn’t hurt his rating.
“People see Klitschko as a good guy. Yes, bad guys are surrounding him, but he isn’t bad,” political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said, describing the phenomenon of Klitschko’s unyielding support before the election.
