Wine glasses lined up on the bar remained intact at the campaign headquarters of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on March 31.
Nobody had the mood to celebrate when all exit polls showed Tymoshenko winning the third place in the first round of the presidential election, meaning she didn’t have to get into the runoff.
But few people expected that the veteran politician who twice served as prime minister and twice went to prison would easily admit her defeat. And she didn’t.
Tymoshenko came up to the press a bit late and called everyone not to trust the “rigged and manipulative” exit polls and wait instead for the results of the parallel vote count conducted by her team.
To prove her point she referred to the result of the exit poll allegedly conducted by her representatives at more than 17,000 polling stations, which showed her second place with 20 percent of votes after political satirist Volodymyr Zelenskiy with 27 percent. President Petro Poroshenko was third with 17.5 percent of support. Holding a scrap of paper with these numbers, she didn’t explain who and how conducted this survey.
Tymoshenko claimed that “Poroshenko and his mafia” were responsible for the “rigged” exit poll results and called on her supporters to come to the polling stations and defend the results.
“We believe that Volodymyr Zelenskiy is in the first place but at the same time by our data Poroshenko is not even close to being in the second place,” she told the journalists, sounding nervous.
The big question was, whether Tymoshenko would call her supporters to the streets as she did in 2004 during the Orange Revolution, a popular people’s uprising caused by the rigged presidential elections.
“When we have the original protocols we will be ready to defend the results,” she said but assured she was not planning riots. “The stability in the country is very important for us,” she said.
Tymoshenko also spoke positively about Zelenskiy, saying that “Ukraine needs young politicians” though she denied she was negotiating with him. A rumor earlier that day said Tymoshenko might endorse Zelenskiy in the runoff in exchange for some representation for her people in his future government or a joint bid at the October parliament election.
“We will compete with Zelenskiy in the second round,” Tymoshenko said before leaving.
She didn’t show up to journalists anymore. The hall was getting emptier to the awkward sounds of energetic music that was resembling the tunes of Ukrainian folk songs.
It has been Tymoshenko’s third presidential campaign. She came second twice, having been defeated by former President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 and by Poroshenko in 2014.
But this will be likely the most bitter defeat for her after the polls were showing her No. 1 for months until Zelenskiy took the lead in January.
Tymoshenko’s team members channeled sadness even more than she did. Their grim faces gave away more than their words.
“Don’t believe the exit polls,” said Serhiy Vlasenko, a lawmaker of Tymoshenko’s party faction, showing at 10 p.m. a photocopy of one protocol from a polling station in Kyiv Oblast, where Tymoshenko was in the second place. The results of her campaign’s parallel vote count of 29 percent of the votes were also showing her in the second place.
The catering staff was delivering coffee, tea, and pastries. People at the headquarters were taking campaign magnets as souvenirs. Some of them pictured a smiling Tymoshenko showing a thumbs-up. The real Tymoshenko was less cheerful on that day.
