After his staggering defeat in the April 21 presidential election, ex-President Petro Poroshenko is going all out to win seats in parliament in the July 21 snap election.
Poroshenko was formally chosen as the leader of his re-branded political party at its convention on May 31. Formerly known as the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, and before that as Solidarity, the party was renamed European Solidarity. Its acronym is now identical to the abbreviation of the European Union in the Ukrainian language.
Other than a facelift, European Solidarity stayed unchanged in its ideology. The key messages of the party’s program echoed Poroshenko’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, which presented him as Ukraine’s number one patriot and the leader capable of stopping Russian President Vladimir Putin.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dissolved the legislature shortly after his inauguration and called for a snap parliamentary vote on July 21. Poroshenko’s party, which holds 130 seats in the parliament, deemed the move unconstitutional but decided to participate in the election.
Currently, Zelenskiy’s political party, Servant of the People, leads in the polls with 43 percent of the vote, according to the latest survey by the Rating sociological group. Poroshenko’s party polls at 8.8 percent.
At the May 31 party convention in Kyiv, Poroshenko and his party members reiterated their priorities: to ensure Ukraine’s membership in the EU and NATO, to resist Russian aggression, to protect the Ukrainian language, and to preserve the accomplishments of Poroshenko’s administration.
They boasted about their accomplishments, showered their leader with praise, and issued pointed jibes at President Zelenskiy.
“Friends, we have to do everything to finish our reforms so that Ukraine applies for EU membership and NATO,” Poroshenko said, calling the reforms carried out by his team “brilliant.”
He also admitted past mistakes that cost him a second term. The party must be closer to the people, work with civil society, and engage more with youth, he said.
The party leaders called on their supporters to unite in order to “prevent revanche.”
As if continuing his presidential campaign, Poroshenko and his allies advanced the idea that Zelenskiy — a political novice and comedic actor by trade who feels most comfortable speaking Russian — will drag the country back under the influence of its hostile neighbor, Russia.
“Ukraine in the EU is death to the Russian imperial project and authoritarianism,” Poroshenko said.
“President Poroshenko managed to stop the Novorossiya project,” said deputy Parliament Speaker Iryna Gerashchenko, referring to a term used by pro-Kremlin forces to describe the territories of southern and eastern Ukraine.
“Our task for the coming years is to stop (Putin’s) Malorossiya project,” Gerashchenko said, implying that Putin’s plan is to return Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence and make it “Little Russia,” a historic Russian name for part of Ukraine that today is regarded as demeaning.
Poroshenko’s camp looked emptier than usual at the convention.
A number of high-profile allies have left the ex-president’s party after his election loss and a series of corruption scandals that erupted amid the presidential campaign.
Among them were lawmakers Ihor Kononenko, a close ally who left the party on the eve of the convention, and Oleksandr Hranovskiy. Both are set to run for parliament, but in single-member districts.
Earlier, three reformist lawmakers — Svitlana Zalishchuk, Sergii Leshchenko, and Mustafa Nayyem — left the Poroshenko Bloc faction and joined other political forces.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who supported Poroshenko’s re-election bid, has also distanced himself from the ex-president, although his wife, lawmaker Iryna Lutsenko, was present.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who assumed his position thanks to Poroshenko’s backing, decided to run for parliament with his own party, saying that he and Poroshenko “are different.”
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, another former ally of Poroshenko, wasn’t at the convention either. Klitschko’s party, UDAR, has yet to announce whether it is running for parliament in 2019.
There was, however, one major addition to Poroshenko’s ranks.
Speaker of the Parliament Andriy Parubiy, previously a member of the People’s Front party, said he was running for parliament with European Solidarity.
“I’m running for parliament with a team of my allies, the people we have been working with in parliament and outside of it,” Parubiy said at the party convention.
Parubiy’s previous party, People’s Front, which came second in the 2014 parliamentary election, isn’t running in 2019 as a party. Its representatives will compete in some single-member districts.
Parubiy warned Zelenskiy’s administration against trying to abolish the recently adopted language law, which enforces the use of the Ukrainian language in the public sector, or Ukrainian language quotas for television and radio. Earlier, Zelenskiy said that the language law might need a revision.
“We will fight in parliament, in the streets and on the squares. We will prevent a revanche,” Parubiy said from the stage.
Poroshenko said that European Solidarity will announce its list of candidates a week after the convention, in early June.
