Landslide win for billionaire
Kiev – A billionaire chocolatemaker yesterday appeared to have won a landslide victory in a presidential election that Ukrainians hope will put an end to months of violence that have claimed hundreds of lives.
Exit polls gave Petro Poroshenko, an independent candidate who was a rank outsider six months ago, 57.3 per cent of the vote, and suggested he would trounce his rivals without the need for a second round of voting.
However, yesterday’s election – triggered by a populist coup that overthrew the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich in February – was off limits for millions of Ukrainians.
While international observers launched the biggest operation on record to ensure fair elections in Kiev and western Ukraine, in Donbass, in the east of the country, voters were denied access to the polling booths by insurgents. About five million people could not vote, out of a nationwide electorate of 35 million.
Speaking afterwards, alongside the boxer Vitali Klitschko, who was elected mayor of Kiev, Poroshenko said: ‘‘The country has a new president’’. He pledged to work with Russia, make peace in east Ukraine, and pursue a future in the European Union.
Turnout was unusually high across the country, reflecting the grave challenges that Ukraine faces, but in the eastern Donbass region separatists who have proclaimed an independent republic of Novorossiya (New Russia) prevented most people from voting.
Seven million voters live there and in Crimea, which Russia annexed in March – although both places harbour a large proportion of people who were either so committed to Russia, or so repelled by the choices available on the 21-candidate ballot, that they would not have voted anyway.
A surprise visit by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, to Crimea yesterday was condemned as a ‘‘provocation’’ by the Ukrainian foreign ministry, but President Vladimir Putin’s declaration on Friday that he would respect the outcome of the vote has raised hopes that the election could mark a turning point in Europe’s worst conflict this century.
More than 100 pro-Russian paramilitaries, bristling with heavy weaponry, paraded in the centre of Donetsk yesterday, brazenly underlining Kiev’s loss of control over the biggest city in the region, while an armed mob of several thousand gathered outside the home of Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov. He came out strongly last week in favour of a united Ukraine, after weeks of equivocating.
Only 426 of 2430 polling stations in the Donetsk region were open, and none in the city itself.
The Organisation for Security and CoOperation in Europe, a democracy watchdog which deployed more than 1000 observers for the election, pulled all of its workers out of Donetsk on Sunday because of safety concerns.
At the station closest to Maidan, the square in Kiev where Ukraine’s revolution began, the first to vote was a retired prosecutor who said he had been unable to sleep the night before for thinking about the ‘‘most important election of my lifetime’’.
Vassily Chernikov, 48, hurtled into a voting booth just after 8am. He said he had voted for Poroshenko.
The billionaire helped to lead both this year’s revolution and the Orange Revolution in 2004. However, his detractors say that his record of working in governments on both sides of Ukraine’s eastwest political divide indicates a lack of principle, and his main concern is using political power to protect his business interests.
Baking hot sunshine in the morning and early afternoon gave way to a huge storm that broke over Maidan shortly after 4pm. It drove the square’s long-term protesters back into their tents.
The few thousand men and women still living in the square or patrolling it in shifts after work see themselves as guardians of the spirit of the revolution. Mr Poroshenko may struggle to win them over.