Politics

Yana Mokhonchuk

June 10, 2019

        The Batkivshschyna Party, led by ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, has announced the top five candidates for parliamentary elections, which will be held on July 21.

        “We do not want to allow revenge so that those who have been ruining the parliament for five years, wouldn’t come and would not become the driving force of lobbying and corruption,” Tymoshenko said of her opponents at her recent party congress, as she called on Ukrainians to vote for changing the entire political system in Ukraine.

        Tymoshenko finished in third place in the March 31 first round of the presidential election, marking her third failed  attempt  at the presidency. She also ran unsuccessfully in 2010 and 2014, and has been imprisoned twice on politically motivated charges, most recently for more than two years during the administration of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown by the EuroMaidan Revolution on Feb. 22, 2014.

        The top 5 members on the Batkivshschyna Party list are:

1.     Yulia Tymoshenko, the party leader;

2.     Serhii Taruta, founder of the Industrial Union of Donbas and former governor of Donetsk Oblast;

3.     Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU.

4.     Serhii Soboliev, acting Batkivshchyna faction leader.

5.     Olena Kondratiuk, a member of parliament.

        Also, on June 10, Tymoshenko declared her readiness to create a parliamentary coalition with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People party after the elections.

“Our team is determined to go into a strong coalition with the new president. And to not just create a coalition, we propose to call it a “coalition of actions” because “we have not just a plan, we have an action plan for 100 days. In 100 days, we will see what will happen in the area of culture, education, medicine. We will adopt the law on medical insurance and stop what we have called medical reform,” Tymoshenko added.

Batkivshchyna said it intends to reduce household tariffs and raise pensions, while still improving the economy.

        The latest polls show that the party is likely to reach the threshold for entry into parliament — but just barely, getting 5.1 percent of the vote, according to the most recent survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (conducted during May, 26 ‒ June, 7, 2019). This result is barely enough to hit the 5% qualification threshold.