The collapse of the Samopomich Party as a national political force in Ukraine continues, with two big names saying they have left the party.
Lawmakers Serhiy Semenchenko, the former leader of Donbas military battalion, and Yehor Sobolev, the deputy head of Samopomich’s faction in parliament, left the party on April 9.
Sobolev told the Kyiv Post he had ideological differences with the party.
Sobolev, the former chairman of parliament’s anti-corruption committee, said he plans to continue his fight against corruption and hopes to unite with other anti-corruption activists. He said potential allies include Semenchenko and Vitaliy Shabunin, the head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center watchdog, with whom Sobalev spoke prior to making his decision public.
Sobolev also said he plans to carry on as a Samopomich faction member in parliament, as he “has responsibilities to those who elected him” a lawmaker after the Euromaidan revolution, events in Kyiv that took the lives of over 100 people and led to the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych.
The Samopomich faction in parliament has 25 members.
Samopomich Party leader Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, a city 500 kilometers west of Kyiv on April 9 wrote on Facebook just before Semenchenko and Sobolev announced they were quitting the party that a number of lawmakers are expected to leave the party in the near future.
“Parliament is living out its last months, and politicians are deciding on their own future and their potential new companions,” wrote Sadovyi. The next parliament elections in Ukraine will take place in October.
Both the Samopomich political party and Sadovyi himself are facing uncertainty after a number of scandals hit both the leader and party.
In 2015, five lawmakers were kicked out Samopomich because of their support of the decentralization law, which eventually passed with 238 votes in favor.
Sadovyi claimed that attempts were made to bribe members of his faction before the voting. Lawmaker Ostap Yednak, who voted for the law and was kicked out of the faction, denied he had been paid to vote for the legislation.
Then, in May 2016, a crisis with Lviv’s waste collection began. After a fire forced a landfill near the city to close, garbage started to pile up on the streets of the largest city in western Ukraine. Sadovyi and members of Samopomich accused the president and his team of preventing Lviv from sending its waste to other regions for disposal.
Lviv garbage trucks were banned from entering other Ukrainian cities, with the crisis resolved only in the summer of 2017.
In October 2018 another scandal struck, with all but two members leaving the Samopomich Kyiv Council faction, citing ideological differences.
Sadovyi announced he would run for president and was registered as a candidate, but later dropped out in favor of former defense minister Anatoliy Grytrsenko. Grytsenko received slightly less than seven percent of the vote and came fifth during the March 31 presidential elections.
According to a poll conducted in March by Rating group, only 2.5 percent of voters will support Samopomich in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
That would mean the party would fail to break the 5-percent threshold to win seats in parliament in party-list voting, although individual candidates from the party could still win a seat in the Rada in majority-voting constituencies.
