Right-wing nationalist parties dominate Ukrainian parliamentary elections By Andrea Peters
27 October 2014
Parliamentary elections in Ukraine Sunday delivered victories to a number of right-wing nationalist parties in a vote that was boycotted by the vast majority of the electorate in the countrys east. Exit polls indicate that the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, Ukraines president, obtained 23 percent of ballots cast, followed by the Peoples Front of current Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, which garnered upwards of 21 percent. Trailing behind these two blocs was the Self Help Party, which reportedly got just over 13 percent of the vote.
Polls closed at 8:00 pm local time, and as of this writing, turnout is estimated at about 40 percent, with large differences between the east and west of the country. If accurate, this would represent a major decline in the overall level of voter participation compared to previous elections. In Ukraines 2012 parliamentary race, 57.4 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, according to data available from the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
It is estimated that between three and five million eligible voters concentrated in the east and southeast of the countrybetween ten and twenty percent of the total electoratedid not participate in the elections. Elections were not held in Donetsk or the Luhansk Peoples Republic, which declared the October 26 vote a farce and scheduled their own votes for early November.
Even in areas under the central governments control, turnout was low in regions with widespread popular hostility towards the Kiev regime. The Central Election Committee estimated voter participation in the southwestern city of Odessa at just 13.2 percent, and in Donetsk and Luhansk at 14.6 and 13.1 percent respectively. In May, dozens were killed in Odessa when pro-Kiev fascist forces trapped anti-government protesters in the local trade union building, massacring them and then setting the building alight.
President Poroshenko has said he is prepared to form a government with the all of the parties of the Maidan, referring to those political forces that backed the right-wing coup that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych last February. In addition to his own bloc, the Peoples Front, and the Self Help Party, this includes the far-right Radical Party of Oleh Lyaschko, the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, and the Fatherland Party of oligarch Yulia Tymoshenko, which respectively won 6.4 percent, 6.3 percent, and 5.6 percent of the vote, according to early estimates.