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Ukrainians are choosing a new parliament in a snap vote seen as a barometer of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity two months after a resounding election victory following his meteoric rise as a political outsider, RFE/RL reported.
Polls opened at 8 a.m. Kyiv time and are expected to close at 8 p.m. tonight (July 21). The first exit polls are expected immediately after voting ends, with preliminary official results expected by early July 22.
After years of struggling with a battered economy, endemic corruption, and a war with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, voters gave Zelensky a resounding mandate to move the country in a new direction.
The question now is whether an allied, months-old political party, Servant Of The People, will do well enough in the July 21 polls to get a majority or a strong plurality in the Verkhovna Rada, possibly providing Zelenskiy a solid mandate to push forward on reforms.
Polls suggest Zelensky, a former comic who played an accidental president in a hit TV sitcom, has managed to retain much of his popularity. He called the early elections three months ahead of its originally scheduled date because the parliament was dominated by his opponents, hampering his capacity to enact reforms.
An International Republic Institute survey released on July 9 showed 67 percent of Ukrainians approving of his job performance.
And a poll released July 18 by Razumkov Center, a Kyiv-based think tank, predicted that the Servant Of The People party was on track to get 40.2 percent of ballots cast, up 4 percentage points from a similar poll taken a month ago.
But even that result would fail to earn it an outright majority and would force the self-declared libertarian party to seek a coalition partner with one of the other parties that manage to pass the 5-percent threshold for parliament.
Iryna Bekeshkina, a political analyst and director of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation research group, noted that Zelensky’s April victory was driven in no small part by young voters.
In an online commentary, however, she predicted that young voters were less likely to turn out to support Servant Of The People, mainly out of a lack of excitement, which could dent the party’s standing.
According to the Razumkov poll, those other parties include Opposition Platform, a political party pushing for better ties with Russia, which trailed with around 12.1 percent, while the party of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko garnered 7.7 percent of support from those polled.
European Solidarity, which is allied with Petro Poroshenko, whom Zelensky defeated in the April election, was polling at around 6.5 percent.
An upstart party called Holos, meanwhile, polled at around 6.1 percent. Led by Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, currently Ukraine’s biggest pop-music star, the party espouses a strong pro-Western, pro-European ideology. Given the lingering ill-will between the Zelensky and Poroshenko camps, that could make Holos the most likely coalition partner for Servant Of The People.
The poll of 2,018 Ukrainians aged 18 and older was conducted July 12-19 and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
Ukraine’s parliament comprises 450 seats. However, only 424 are up for grabs after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and war in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions saw the loss of several voting districts.
Under Ukrainian law, half of the seats are distributed according to lists generated by the parties; the other half are distributed to majority winners in districts where there is only a single-member constituency.
Even with a fresh face, and the charisma born of popular TV series that shares its name with the political party, Zelensky has seen his presidency dogged by questions about how willing he is to break from the oligarch-and-backroom-deals tradition of politicking in Ukraine.
Zelensky’s ties to one of the country’s wealthiest men, Ihor Kolomoyskiy, has worried reformers and some Western supporters. Zelensky’s chief of staff previously worked as Kolomoyskiy’s lawyer.
But many — though not all — of the candidates on the list released by the Servant Of The People party are political novices; even current members of parliament who would be obvious additions to the party’s list were kept off, purportedly as a way for the party to assert it was making a break from politics as usual.
On the whole, the run-up to the July 21 vote was punctuated by more typical dirty tricks.
They included “clone candidates” — in which little-known individuals with names nearly identical to established candidates show up on ballots in a bid to confuse voters.
Western supporters of Zelensky’s efforts will be watching to see whether his parliamentary allies can push through key reform legislation to tackle problems like the country’s rickety gas and electricity infrastructure; the nascent state of anti-corruption laws and agencies; and an oligarchic system that has all but dictated policymaking for years.
A month after Zelensky’s election, the World Bank warned that investors’ confidence had been dented by uneven reforms and election uncertainties. The lender said growth could fall below 2 percent if major reforms were stalled.
“In order to accelerate economic growth, Ukraine needs swift progress on key unfinished reforms,” said Satu Kahkonen, World Bank country director for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. “This includes opening the agricultural land market, unbundling the energy sector, strengthening governance of state-owned banks, making progress on anti-corruption, and safeguarding fiscal stability.”
