Oleksandr Senkevych, a member of Samopomich Party and a reformist, pro-Western politician, lost his post as mayor of Mykolaiv just two years after winning it in the fall of 2015.
The city council of Mykolaiv, a major seaport city some 500 kilometers south of Kyiv, voted on Oct. 5 to dismiss Senkevych. The council members were dissatisfied with the mayor’s performance.
Among 54 members elected to the council, 42 lawmakers from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, Opposition Bloc, and Nash Kray (Our Land) voted in support of this decision. Senkevych’s Samopomich refused to vote.
For many, the election of Senkevych symbolized the rise of patriotism in the traditionally pro-Russian city. He defeated a candidate from the local old political elite in the two-round election. In the city of almost 500,000 citizens, he gained victory with 80,600 votes.
“No one expected me to win in the second round,” he recalled his competition with Ihor Dyatlov, a member of Opposition Bloc who used to be head of Mykolaiv Oblast Council under the rule of the disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.
The lawmakers from Opposition Bloc, a party that succeeded to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, tried to fight back and appoint the reelections through the Verkhovna Rada, accusing Senkevych of election fraud. But the parliament’s committees rejected the bill.
Besides Mykolaiv, Samopomich won city leadership for the third time in Lviv. The part was founded and is led by the Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi.
A member of the Mykolaiv city council from the Poroshenko Bloc Volodymyr Krylenko, who voted to dismiss Senkevych, said he initially believed in the mayor, but saw little action in the city development.
Now Senkevych plans to fight the city council’s decision in court. He filed an appeal on Oct. 12 to suspend his dismissal. But his ultimate plan would be to run in the next election.
The parliament will have 90 days to set the date for new elections in Mykolaiv. Senkevych hopes it will happen next spring. Until then, the city council secretary will act as a mayor.
“I think I was lucky to survive two years in this toxic environment,” he said about working with the city council.
Despite the fact that he has little support from the lawmakers, Senkevych said he was appreciated by the local community. The city council decision triggered a rally in favor of mayor with hundreds of citizens attending.
According to the poll run by nonprofit International Republican Institute, the ex-mayor’s support has increased by 22 percent over 2016, reaching 44 percent.
Oleksandr Lemenov, an expert with the Reanimation Package of Reforms, said the decision to dismiss the mayor is “an abuse of power in the political context.” Despite the fact that the law allows the lawmakers to vote against the mayor, Lemenov said the decision was a political one.
“As a consequence, we see the situations when lawmakers from several parties unite and try to cancel the results of the elections,” Lemenov said, adding that several dozens of lawmakers are challenging the decision of thousands of citizens.
Valeriy Prut, a retiree and a civil activist, was one of those who attended the rally in Mykolaiv on the rainy day of Oct. 8. He said he came not in support of Senkevych, but rather because he considered the city council’s dismissal of mayor an abuse of power.
Prut said he voted for Senkevych because he was “a new person, not from the same deck of cards.” He expected the mayor to help the city get through stagnation. Prut said he is glad to see local roads to be repaired, but he still expects the officials to improve public transportation and create more jobs.
“People wanted to see more workplaces instead of going (to work) somewhere outside,” he said.
According to the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting, the business climate in Mykolaiv Oblast is one of the worst in the country, ranked 21st among 24 oblasts and Kyiv city in the study in October.
The city shows better results in transparency and open data access. In another ranking of transparency and openness, published by Transparency International in April, Mykolaiv was placed on the fourth position out of 25 cities with 50 points out of 100. The winning city was Kropyvnytskyi, former Kirovohrad, with 55 points.
Though Prut also noticed some good changes, like the decrease in corruption, he expected more development to be done in the city. It is because Senkevych couldn’t cooperate well with the old elite and push the progress, Prut said.
“Senkevych proved he is a good guy, who doesn’t give and doesn’t take bribes, but as a manager, he turned out to be a nonentity,” Prut said.
Prut added that he expected Senkevych to request the city council reelection, but the mayor hadn’t initiated it because it would be too hard to get an approval from the parliament.
“It’s risky,” Senkevych said. “I would be called a populist. They would say I am a small boy, being offended by everyone.”
While he is supported by some locals, Senkevych feels no support from the state-level officials.
“Success of the country is the success of the big cities,” he said adding that the top officials don’t understand that.
Yehor Soboliev, a member of the parliament with Samopomich Party, also attended the rally in support of Senkevych. He put his hopes into the community for the reelections and said that Senkevych would be the strongest candidate.
“If the community elects the mayor (without falsifications), then Senkevych has a chance to get even more support than in 2015,” Soboliev said.
