Parties led by Ukraine’s PM and president are in the lead, now that half of the Sunday parliamentary elections ballots have been processed. Several southeastern regions have however given the majority of votes for the Opposition Bloc.
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With 50.08 percent of ballots having been processed, PM Arseny Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party is ahead of rivals with 21.61 percent of votes, according to Ukraine’s Central Election Commission (CEC). The president’s Petro Poroshenko Bloc is only slightly behind, so far garnering 21.45 percent.
The two parties have already launched negotiations on forming a
coalition, according to the head of the Poroshenko Bloc, Yury
Lutsenko.
“We have recently started talks with the People’s
Front”, he said as cited by RIA Novosti. “There have
taken place consultations between the president and the prime
minister, and there’s an expanded meeting of representatives of
the two political forces planned for today."
The CEC also announced that only four other parties have passed the 5 percent threshold thus far. The parties making it into the Ukrainian parliament are the Samopomosh of Lvov's Mayor Andrey Sadovy (11.10), Opposition Bloc (9.82), Radical Party of Oleg Lyashko (7.38), and Yulia Tymoshenko's party Batkivshchina (Fatherland) (5.69).
Despite the overall parliamentary vote being led by the parties
of the Ukrainian president and prime minister, described as the
pro-EU ones, several regions in the southeast of the country
demonstrated a different trend.
The Opposition Bloc, headed by former Deputy Prime Minister Yury
Boiko, is ahead in the Kharkov, Lugansk and Zaporozhye Regions,
according to preliminary data by Ukraine’s Central Election
Commission. In the Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk Regions the
Opposition Bloc is also leading the vote count in several
election districts.
International exit polls earlier predicted a win for the
Poroshenko Bloc, saying the party was supported by 23 percent of
voters.
"We can say today that a third of voters support the
president's course for carrying out reforms for entering the
European Union," said Yury Lutsenko, leader of the
Poroshenko Bloc.
Moscow considers the Ukrainian parliamentary elections valid, according to Deputy Foreign Minister
Grigory Karasin.
“We are waiting for official results. So far quite
controversial information has been coming. But even now it’s
clear that elections, despite quite tough and dirty campaign,
have been valid,” Karasin told Interfax.
“The balance of forces that is emerging will likely allow the
Ukrainian leadership to engage in thoroughly solving the core
national problems,” he added.
Ukrainians voted Sunday to choose from a total of 29 political
parties. A party has to pass the threshold of five percent in
order to be represented in the Verkhovna Rada. Half of the seats
in the 450-member parliament will be filled by the leading blocs,
while the other half will be filled by candidates running in
single-member constituencies.
However, voting did not take place in the eastern part of the
country in the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and
Lugansk. Authorities of these regions stated they would not go to
the polls and plan to hold elections of their own heads and
parliaments on November 2.