All change in Ukraine as new party set to win snap election
● Exit poll suggests Zelensky will have to form coalition to take power
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party was set to take the largest share of votes after the country’s snap parliamentary election.
The poll of 13,000 voters showed his new Servant of the People getting 43.9 per cent of the vote for party-list candidates, far ahead of rivals.
Mr Zelensky, who took office in May, called the election three months ahead of schedule because the parliament was dominated by his opponents.
He had been seeking a majority that would support his promised fight against Ukraine’s endemic corruption and allow him to carry out other sweeping reforms.
The exit poll suggests that, while he will have the largest party, a coalition will be needed to form a government. The election was widely expected to give him a greater mandate for reform, sweeping aside the old guard and bringing new faces to parliament.
Speaking in Kiev after the polls closed, Mr Zelensky said he was inviting a party led by rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk to hold talks on forming a coalition.
“This was my initiative even before the election,” Mr Zelensky said.
Mr Vakarchuk’s Holos (The Voice) party is projected to win about 6 per cent of the vote.
Buoyed by the exit poll, Mr Zelensky said the victory “shows great trust by the people of Ukraine to our party”.
He said fighting corruption and establishing peace in the war-wracked east will be the top tasks.
He said: “The main priorities for us and for every Ukrainian are the stopping of war, the return of our prisoners and victory over the corruption that remains in Ukraine.”
More than 13,000 people have been killed in a five-year war with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Mr Zelensky triumphed in April’s presidential poll but has been unable to appoint the ministers he wants.
His Servant of the People party is named after the television comedy in which he played a teacher who unexpectedly becomes president.
A party led by one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest associates, tycoon Viktor Medvedchuk, was in second place with 11.5 per cent of the vote, according to the exit poll. It was followed by the European Solidarity party of former president Petro Porosaid shenko, whom Mr Zelenskiy defeated by a landslide in the country’s spring presidential election.
Mr Zelenskiy’s party intends to continue a pro-western course towards joining the European Union and Nato, combining this with economic reforms and an intensified fight against endemic corruption. “With Zelenskiy, a new political team should come into politics that will continue the reforms that Poroshenko spoke about beautifully but did not do,” 35-year-old lawyer Viktor Shumeiko at a polling station in Kiev.
Mr Medvedchuk says Ukraine’s proper course is to improve its relations with Moscow, which plummeted after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Since Mr Putin is the godfather of Mr Medvedchuk’s daughter, his statements probably reflect Kremlin thinking. Mr Medvedchuk and the Russian leader met on Thursday in St Petersburg.
Dmytro Razumkov, head of Mr Zelenskiy’s party, said it is ready to negotiate with Russia on mechanisms for conflict resolution and seeks peace in the east “but not at any cost”. “What Medvedchuk says is not a strategy for returning territories, not a strategy for ending the war,” he said.
Overall, five parties cleared the 5 per cent threshold necessary to get party-list seats. In all, the parties got less than 80 per cent of the overall vote, suggesting that Mr Zelenskiy’s party was likely to win a majority of the party-list seats.
The exit poll had a margin of error of 2.5 per cent.