VAKARCHUK’S VOICE PARTY REVEALS ITS CANDIDATES FOR PARLIAMENT
Artur Korniienko
June 9, 2019
Reformers, anti-corruption activists, academics, a respected journalist and a successful IT executive topped the list of parliament candidates revealed by the Voice party (Holos in Ukrainian) on the evening of June 8.
Voice, a new party led by rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk which positions itself as social-democratic and pro-European, unveiled candidates at their first ever convention, six weeks before the July 21 parliamentary elections.
The list is yet to be approved by party delegates and most of the listed candidates have never been members of parliament. But the party’s mission is not just bringing new faces to the Rada, Vakarchuk says.
“The members of our team are patriots, professionals and just decent people for whom state interests are at the highest. And this is the main value of the Voice party – we go to parliament to make real changes,” Vakarchuk, number one on the party list, said at the convention.
The top-10 members on the list of the Voice party are:
1. Svyatoslav Vakarchuk – leader of the party, front man of the popular rock band Okean Elzy, former member of Ukrainian Parliament in 2007-2008 with The Our Ukraine – People’s Self-Defense Bloc.
2. Yulia Klymenko – head of the party, former Deputy Economy Minister in 2014-2016, head of the Kyiv School of Economics.
3. Kira Rudik – chief operating officer of Ring Ukraine, an IT company purchased by tech giant Amazon for $1 billion in 2018.
4. Yaroslav Zhelezniak – advisor to the Prime Minister for parliamentary relations since 2017, lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics.
5. Oleksandra Ustinova – board member of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, head of communications and anti-Corruption in health care projects there.
6. Oleg Makarov – managing partner at Vasil Kisil & Partners law firm from 2007-2015 and former deputy in the Kyiv city council.
7. Yaroslav Yurchyshyn – deputy head of the party, former chief executive officer at Transparency International Ukraine in 2016-2019.
8. Serhiy Rakhmanin – first deputy chief editor of the influential Dzerkalo Tyzhnya (Mirror of the Week) newspaper.
9. Solomiia Bobrovska – former deputy governor of Odesa Oblast in 2016-2017, briefly was the acting governor.
10. Olha Stefanyshyna – deputy minister of health since 2018.
The top-10 members list of the Voice party is gender balanced, with five women and five men.
In total, the party has announced 195 candidates on the closed party ballot. Other members include popular comedic actor and presenter Serhiy Prytula, Crimean Tatar businessman and philanthropist Rustem Umerov, and war veteran Roman Kostenko who defended the Donetsk airport from the Russian-backed forces.
The party also presented its list of 72 candidates that will compete in the single-member districts at the election. Under the current electoral system, half of the parliament’s 450 lawmakers are elected by closed party lists and another half are chosen through single-member districts.
The Voice party convention has not yet finally approved the party lists. Instead, the party delegates voted to give journalists and activists a couple of days to review the records of all the potential party members before the Voice will register the final lists at the Central Election Commission.
According to the latest polls published before the party list announcements, Vakarchuk’s Voice party had the fifth largest support rating among decided voters. It would receive 5.6-percent support, passing the 5-percent threshold at the parliamentary elections, according to a Rating Group Ukraine poll published on June 5, 2019.
