Ukraine’s presidential election were won decisively in the first round on Sunday (25 May) by Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire businessman and politician.
His victory, though not yet officially confirmed, has already been accepted by his principal rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, who had threatened during the election campaign that she would launch a “third round of the revolution” if Poroshenko won.
The European Union and the United States had warned Russia, in light of its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March, that disruption of the elections would trigger economic sanctions. In the event, disruption was limited to districts in Donetsk and Luhansk controlled by separatist militia for much of the past three months.
Turnout nationally was 60%, rising to 78% in the western region of Lviv.
Poroshenko now needs to address two immediate challenges: to Kiev’s control of Ukraine, and to Ukraine’s energy supply. Immediately after his victory, Poroshenko called for the separatist threat in eastern Ukraine to be crushed within “hours”, lending his authority to a military operation launched shortly before the election.
The chances that the election might help to ease the tensions with Russia have been improved by a decision by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin – reiterated on Monday (26 May) by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov – that Russia would recognise the election result. However, there is as yet no sign of a resolution of a dispute over gas supplies, which Russia has threatened to cut off or reduce from 1 June if Ukraine does not agree to pay for gas in advance.
The European Union has welcomed the conduct of the election – judged to be free, fair and largely in line with international standards by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – but, in their official response, the presidents of the European Council and Commission, Herman Van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso, refrained from mentioning an EU-Ukraine trade deal, which is ready for signing but which has been a major bone of contention in relations with Russia.
Poroshenko’s overwhelming victory, with 54% of the vote, has swept aside talk of an unbridgeable east-west divide in Ukraine, since he came out on top almost everywhere. One district in the Kharkiv region was carried by Mykhailo Dobkin, a former governor of the region, and polling was impossible in most districts in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The election dispelled notions of a significant far-right dimension to Ukrainian politics, with the candidates of the far-right gaining just over 2% of the vote. The result also suggests that the Party of Regions – the party of the former president, Viktor Yanukovych – will have great difficulty rebuilding itself. The election could in addition lead to fissures within the leading party in the interim government, Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), which was created by Tymoshenko. Balázs Jarábik of the think-tank FRIDE predicts that Arseniy Yatsenyuk will remain prime minister, but that Poroshenko will remove several of Tymoshenko’s allies.
A desire by parties to regroup after the presidential election may determine whether parliamentary elections are set for November – the date usually talked about – or for later. Another influence on the date of the election is the passage of constitutional reforms. The EU, the United States and Russia called for constitutional reforms when they held four-way talks with Ukraine in Geneva on 17 April. The government’s aim is for the draft proposals, which were passed to parliament on 15 May, to be read and amended by the Verkhovna Rada before the summer break, enabling the reforms to be pushed through in September.
The debate about constitutional reform will also be shaped by an ongoing series of national roundtables championed by the EU and the US. The reforms under discussion centre on political decentralisation, reform of the judiciary and the balance of power between the presidency and parliament. Russia had pushed for the separatists to be included, and has repeatedly called for the country to adopt a federal system.