Technically, the local election results can be considered a win for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his Solidarnist party.
An analysis by the Rating sociological group shows that the Poroshenko allies got just 19 percent of the overall vote in Ukraine’s local elections and mayoral races. If accurate, that puts his forces ahead of others, but the results hardly constitute a resounding endorsement.
The elections began on Oct. 25, continued with runoff elections on Nov. 15 and will wind up on Nov. 29 with votes in two cities, Mariupol and Krasnoarmyisk, where problems forced a rescheduling of elections in both Donetsk Oblast municipalities.
None of the multitude of competing parties could be said to have emerged as a dominant political force, with a convincing national mandate, experts say.
That’s not surprising: polls ahead of the vote indicated broad public disappointment with the post-EuroMaidan Revolution government, with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party choosing not to even put up candidates due to its dismal ratings. And Poroshenko’s party only bested the rest by capitalizing on rivalries among local political groups and oligarchs, said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta political think tank.
Even playing off local animosities wasn’t enough for Poroshenko’s party to dominate. “Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc will have to seek compromise with other forces – which is good,” Fesenko added.
Valentyna Romanova, local and regional policy expert at New Ukraine think tank, agreed. “The election results show that local politics is more diverse than we had expected,” she said.
All the same, Poroshenko’s Solidarnist did win the mayoral seats in Kyiv, Zhytomyr and Chernihiv. In some big cities, including Kherson, Vinnytsia and Rivne, pro-presidential forces also backed independent mayoral candidates, helping them to win.
The president said on Nov. 16 that he was satisfied with the local and mayoral elections, where “representatives of the democratic coalition” won in most of the Nov. 15 runoff races.
Meanwhile, another representative of the democratic coalition – former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose Batkivshchyna Party was on the rise in the opinion polls ahead of the local elections – is probably less satisfied with the results.
Although Batkivshchyna doubled its vote in comparison with the October 2014 parliament elections, garnering about 12 percent according to Rating, the party failed to become the top party in any regional council. This reduces its chances on the national stage to bargain for more posts in the Cabinet of Ministers.
However, Batkivshchyna reaffirmed its support in northern and central Ukraine, where it secured mayoral seats in the regional capitals of Sumy and Cherkasy.
Another parliamentary coalition member, the Samopomich Party, surprised many when its candidate Oleksandr Senkevych won the mayoral race in the traditionally pro-Russian city of Mykolayiv. More predictably, Samopomich founder and incumbent Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy won reelection. Only two years old, the party also achieved good results in other city councils, prompting some analysts to call it the “party of big cities.”
The pro-Russian Opposition Bloc, an offshoot of runaway former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, got 11 percent of the nationwide vote, two percentage points more than during last year’s parliamentary elections. However, it failed to win the mayoral seat of any oblast capital. It “half-won” in Zaporizhya, where the mayoral post went to Volodymyr Buriak, a chief engineer of a local steel mill owned by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest billionaire and a key backer of the Opposition Bloc.
Ihor Kolomoisky, the nation’s second richest oligarch and former governor of Dnipropetrovsk, saw some success with his Ukrop party. Lawmaker Borys Filatov, the Kolomoisky-backed candidate for Dnipropetrovsk, the nation’s fourth largest city with about 1 million people, was elected mayor of the city. Positioning itself as a patriotic party, Ukrop also won a number of seats in regionals councils in western Ukraine.
Fesenko attributed the successes of Ukrop and nationalist Svoboda Party in western Ukraine to the fact that ultra-nationalist Right Sector didn’t run in the elections.
The newly founded parties Revival (Vidrodzhennia) and Our Land (Nash Krai) ended up filling the void left by the implosion of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.
Our Land gained seats in 10 regional councils, and Revival in eight. Revival candidate Hennady Kernes was re-elected as mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. And in Uzhhorod, in westernmost Zakarpattya Oblast, located just two kilometers from the European Union, Revival’s Bohdan Andriyiv won the mayoral race.
Political analyst Vadym Karasiov said Our Land, which incorporated many former and incumbent mayors who used to belong to Yanukovych’s party, was backed by the president’s office to prevent the Opposition Bloc from gaining more ground. Revival, also consisting of former Yanukovych allies, is affiliated with Kolomoisky.
But it would be folly to assume that these two parties are completely subordinate to the Kolomoisky or to the presidential administration, according to Fesenko.
“They are the political projects of local elites,” he said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
