Local elections: pro-reformists forces lead

UKRAINE - In Brief 26 Oct 2015 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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On October 25th Ukrainians have been electing local MPs and mayors of the cities. Interesting that new law on local elections was approved in July 2015 just few months before the voting. As a result, rules of the game were totally changed and created a lot of confusion. In essence, there were introduced two critical changes: (i) mayors of the cities should be elected with absolute majority (more than 50% of votes), (ii) local MPs (except for MPs of villages) were elected under hybrid proportional system (effectively it was voting for party lists). The election process was unusually smooth with only few cases of disruption registered. In particular, at the front-line Mariupol city large-scale fraud was suspected and elections were cancelled. Low level of tension was also reflected with low participation rate. For instance, in Kyiv only 44% of voters participated in elections. We do not have the complete picture of voting so far but we already know mayors’ voting exit-polls at the largest cities. In essence, the two major surprises were observed in Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa. For instance, in Dnipropetrovsk Boris Filatov, a person from Igor Kolomoyskiy team took the lead leaving behind Oleksandr Vilkul one of the leaders of the former Party of Regions. Though Filatov is not pro-president he is definitely against Russia and he is pro-reformist. As regards to Odesa, it was a real surprise to see Sasha Borokiv, member of Michael Saakashvili team taking second place lagging behind current mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov. The point is that Sasha Borokiv started campaign just few weeks before elections and it is a big success to gain such impressive support for very short period of tim...