Lviv City Mayor Andriy Sadovyi has announced he will run for the presidency in March 2019.
His political party Samopomich (Self-Reliance), which has 26 seats in parliament, published the news on its website on Oct. 3.
“My goal is very simple but complicated at the same time – to restore your faith in Ukraine,” Sadovyi said at a youth forum in Lviv on Oct. 3, according to Samopomich’s website. “Today you have the whole world, but you can build your own country only here. I suggest to you that we should fight for it together.”
Sadovyi has served as mayor of Lviv since 2006, and is now the longest serving mayor of any major city in Ukraine.
He hasn’t yet announced his team and agenda, but he said he is ready to unite with all political forces, who want “decisive changes.”
The Lviv mayor said that Ukraine is lagging behind the world’s leaders in development. So to catch up, it needs to concentrate all of the efforts and intellects of its citizens.
“This is a matter of national security and survival,” Sadovyi said. “Otherwise, there will be no prosperity, no happiness, no victory in the war.”
The Kyiv Post talked with Sadovyi in Lviv in June. He made no mention of his presidential election plans at that time, but said he was “ready to take responsibility” outside of his city.
“My entry into (national) politics was because of the fact that I’ve achieved the limit of what I could do in Lviv,” he said in June. “You cannot build a successful city without building a successful country.”
Read the Kyiv Post’s interview with Sadovyi here.
His party achieved rapid success in 2014 when it entered parliament for the first time, winning 32 seats, but its support has declined since then.
Sadovyi’s rating has dropped as well, after a crisis in waste collection in Lviv left the city’s streets strewn with piles of garbage.
The Razumkov Center public policy think tank election poll carried out in September shows only 2.2 percent support for Sadovyi as president. The leading candidate, Yulia Tymoshenko, got the support of almost 13 percent of those polled.
