A member of an election commission holds a mobile election box as she visits local residents during a parliamentary election in Horodyshche near Chernihiv, yesterday.
DPA
Kiev
Pro-Western forces led by the party of President Petro Poroshenko were set to win yesterday’s Ukrainian parliamentary elections, according to exit polls.
The Poroshenko bloc stands to get 23%, followed by prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s National Front with 21.3%, according to the national exit poll conducted by three polling institutes. The pro-European Samopomich party, led by the mayor of the western city of Lviv, came in third with 13.2%.
Yatsenyuk left the Fatherland party of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko in August together with many other prominent party figures. However, Tymoshenko’s party managed to just meet the 5% hurdle for staying in the legislature by getting 5.6%, according to the polls.
Also in parliament, according to the poll, are: the nationalist Svoboda party (6.3); the Radical Party of populist politician Oleh Lyashko (6.4); and the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc party (7.6).
Among those who failed to get in are the Communists with 2.9 and the nationalist Right Sector party with 2.4.
The election commission has said that preliminary results will be published after midnight (2200 GMT).
If confirmed, the result means that pro-Western groups will control more than two thirds of the 450-seat unicameral parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
That would be a sharp break with the previous Rada, elected for a five-year period in 2012, which was dominated by Russia-leaning forces.
Poroshenko has said he hopes that the snap election will bring more stability to the crisis-hit country, where more than 3,600 people have been killed in a conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the east.
Observers doubt, however, that a new government - expected to be formed as early as next week - will be able to do much to end the fighting.
Security was tight on Sunday, and some 84,000 police officers were on duty throughout Ukraine to ensure a peaceful vote, the interior ministry said.
The Ukrainian Election Commission said that the turnout at 4pm (1400 GMT) stood at almost 40%, based on figures from 127 of the 198 voting districts, the Interfax Ukraine news agency reported.
“I voted for Ukraine - single, indivisible, European,” Poroshenko said on Twitter after casting his ballot in Kiev Friday afternoon.
Doris Barnett, a German lawmaker who heads the observer mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation’s Parliamentary Assembly, said that the missing territories won’t affect the elections’ legitimacy.
Those who claim otherwise try to discredit and disrupt the elections, said Barnett in comments reported by the Interfax Ukraine news agency.
No major security breaches were reported.
However, police said that they had thwarted attempts to falsify the vote by casting multiple ballots.
Mustafa Nayyem, a prominent journalist who is standing for Poroshenko’s party, said that his car was badly damaged when a mob of seven people attacked it while he was campaigning in the Kirovohrad region.
Nayyem and two other journalists were campaigning against voter fraud in the southern region.
“Today we have a new Ukraine,” Poroshenko said after voting in the capital Kiev. “I hope it will be possible to form a strong, pro-European democratic coalition.”
The snap election came eight months after a street revolt overthrew Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych, sparking conflict with Russia and a crisis in relations between the Kremlin and Ukraine’s Western allies.
Yesterday’s election was meant to clear out the last vestiges of the Yanukovych regime.
But the war with pro-Russian rebels in the industrial east, in which 3,700 people have died, and Russia’s earlier annexation of the southern Crimean region, cast a long shadow.
Voters in Crimea and in separatist-controlled areas of the eastern Lugansk and Donetsk provinces -- about 5mn of Ukraine’s 36.5mn-strong electorate -- were unable to cast ballots.
Even 25,000 soldiers deployed in the war zone were shut out, Poroshenko said, blaming the outgoing parliament for failing to make provisions.
Twenty seven seats in the 450-seat parliament will remain empty.
Dressed in camouflage, Poroshenko helicoptered in for a surprise visit to Kramatorsk, a government-held town in the heart of the conflict zone.
The dramatic gesture was clearly meant to show that the beleaguered region has not been forgotten.
“Today on territory liberated by Ukrainian servicemen they will vote for the European future of our country,” Poroshenko said in nationally televised remarks.
However, the disenfranchisement of the separatist areas and Crimea seemed likely to further cement the once peaceful, now bloody faultline between Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east and Ukrainian-speaking west.
After casting a vote for the radical nationalist Svoboda party in the capital Kiev, Tatyana Kryshko, 75, reflected the generally grim mood.
“I know things will be hard financially. I think that we won’t live to see a rich and strong Ukraine, but that our children and grandchildren will,” she told AFP.
Polls show a majority of Ukrainians support economic and democratic reforms -- especially a crackdown on corruption -- leading eventually to European Union membership.
However, there is less unity over how to resolve the dismemberment of the country in Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the separatist battle in the east.
A Moscow-backed truce signed by Kiev and the separatists on September 5 has calmed the worst fighting, although there are daily violations around the largest rebel-held city Donetsk.
Insurgent leaders, who are not allowing polling stations to open in their areas, have announced their own leadership vote, which Kiev does not recognise, on November 2.
In theory, residents in places like Donetsk could leave and vote elsewhere, but one young man in the rebel-held city said that wasn’t happening.
“I don’t know anyone who has any intention of leaving Donetsk to go and vote,” he said.
Ukrainian soldiers deployed nearby who were also barred from voting because they were in the conflict zone said they felt insulted.
“I think it’s really not right that we don’t have a chance to vote. Everyone should, especially people who are dying for this country,” said Volodymyr Derchak, 62, a member of the volunteer Artemovsk battalion.
Poroshenko insisted this week that there can be “no military solution” to the conflict with pro-Russian rebels and renewed his pledged to seek a political compromise.
That message was likely to be welcome by Ukrainians alarmed at the prospect of open-ended war against shadowy forces that most people here believe are backed by Russia, although Moscow denies this.
Valentina Pavlova, a 65-year-old pensioner voting in Mariupol, a city near separatist territory, told AFP she had voted for one of the few parties opposing the radical nationalists.
“I don’t like the radical parties that think they can just beat anyone up,” she said. “I think a lot of people here will vote the same as myself. We are at the frontier now, we watch the news every night in fear.”
But Poroshenko’s softer line could meet resistance in the new parliament, where deputies are set to include members of hardline nationalist groups and soldiers turned politicians.