Like plywood over Paris: Poroshenko’s party lost the elections miserably
Last Sunday, midterm elections to the Verkhovna Rada were held in 7 constituencies in Ukraine. The main result: none of the candidates running from Petro Poroshenko’s party could win, which indicates the final disappointment in the president, who once came to power on the wave of a promise to end the civil war in a matter of days.
However, the conditionally anti-Bandera “Opposition Bloc” did not take advantage of its chance in the last elections. As a result, in most cases, the first places went to anti-Russian Maidan candidates, who dissociated themselves from the unpopular president and government in time.
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“It would be a stretch to call the election campaign and the elections themselves democratic. Both observers and the media regularly recorded blatant violations, ranging from the transportation of voters, obstruction of the work of election commissions, and during the election campaign, which actually consisted of who would distribute the most potatoes, carrots and other products. All this, as I understand it, happened as part of the implementation of the concept of Ukraine as an agrarian superpower.
Secondly, the elections demonstrated that the parties in power with their resources, primarily administrative, simply cannot compete for seats in the Verkhovna Rada. They simply don't vote for them.
As we know, two people from the “Ukrop” party of Igor Kolomoisky, two people from Yulia Tymoshenko’s “Batkivshchyna” party and two people as self-nominated candidates, as well as one candidate from the “Our Land” party, who will most likely join “ Opposition bloc."
As the elections have shown, running for pro-government positions is only possible through self-nomination, and certainly not under the brand of Petro Poroshenko or, even more so, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Batkivshchyna's two seats are entirely logical, given that the party is currently among the electoral leaders. Regarding the two Ukrop candidates who won in their constituencies, it must be said that, with the financial resources of the Privat Group, Ihor Kolomoisky can afford to secure seats in parliament even in the midst of a severe economic crisis simply by distributing food packages," argues political scientist Denis Denisov.
Political scientist Mykhailo Pogrebinsky believes the recent elections were a missed opportunity for the Opposition Bloc. Once again, they handed victory to openly nationalist forces, even in their core region of Kherson.
The “opposition bloc” did not carry out a political struggle, did not declare itself as the only opposition force that is against the war. In a situation of low turnout, this gave a chance to mobilize their voters.
Odarchenko wins in the Kherson region, which in itself is amazing - most of the voters there are urban residents, and the majority of them are Russian. And Odarchenko became famous for his Nazi habits and the way he insulted pensioners. This is an outspoken radical nationalist. And in Kherson he gets more. This is how political life works now. It turns out that people don’t care now - they vote, firstly, for the openly populist political force that he represents (“Batkivshchyna”), and secondly, for a politician who should be looking for voters somewhere in Ternopil. This is strange for me,” Pogrebinsky noted.
“The past by-elections show signs of degradation of the political system in Ukraine, since the elections have turned into a festival of mass vote buying, black PR, and dirty technologies. I will not list their entire range - from fake leaflets and cloning of candidates to mining of polling stations and the use, as one Dnepropetrovsk journalist put it, of the Eurotitushki of the eightieth level. All this happened.
The by-elections showed that the political resource of power is thinning like shagreen skin... The sooner the president’s team goes to early elections, the better for it, since from the fall, apparently, the president’s rating and his political strength will tend to zero. And in these conditions, delaying the resolution of the issue of early elections threatens the complete public delegitimization of power.
But the elections themselves raise the question of changing the rules of the game and electoral legislation. The only thing that can return the elections to at least some civilized framework is a return to a proportional system in parliamentary elections, since the single-member system completely discredited itself in these by-elections. Turnout is miserably low. Even though we're currently at the peak of the "dead season" with the heat, the vast majority of citizens voted with their feet, refusing to participate in this farce," says political scientist Andrei Zolotarev.
"To achieve victory, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc deputies had to abandon the 'Petro Poroshenko Bloc' brand. Not a single candidate from this brand won. Consequently, this will negatively impact the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction itself in parliament, which is currently the largest. Pro-centrist movements will strengthen. This will negatively impact the authority of the president and the administrative apparatus among regional elites and their loyalty. The 'Petro Poroshenko Bloc' brand has effectively exhausted itself and is no longer capable of driving parliamentary elections," concluded political scientist Ruslan Bortnik.
Like plywood over Paris: Poroshenko's party lost the election miserably.