By DPA
Kiev : Ukraine’s recent parliamentary election gave a narrow victory to pro-Western forces, official results showed.
The number two and three parties in Sunday’s vote – the anti-corruption Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT) and the nationalist Our Ukraine National Self-Defence (OUNSD) – received 30.71 percent and 14.15 percent of ballots cast, according to official data of the Central Election Commission (CEC) made public Friday.
The election was free and fair, and despite delays in reaching an official count, more smoothly executed than the last election in 2006, CEC officials said. International observers pronounced the Sunday election generally well run.
The final count numbers will allow the two parties, should they choose to form a coalition, to take a 228-seat majority in the 450-member legislature. Leaders of BYuT and OUNSD earlier this week stated they fully intended to join forces in an alliance, directly after formal vote results were published.
The first-place party in the race, the pro-Russia Regions Ukraine, captured 34.37 percent of ballots cast. But even were it to ally with the fourth and fifth place parties, the resulting coalition would not be enough to overcome a majority created by BYuT and OUNSD – both pro-Europe parties supporting closer relations with NATO and an early entry for Ukraine into the European Union.
Leaders of both the pro-West parties have categorically rejected any alliance with the Marxist Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), which took fourth place with 5.39 percent and is expected to join the opposition with Regions.
The fifth-place party, the Block of Volodymyr Litvin, captured 3.96 percent and could become a member of the expected pro-West alliance, depending on coalition talks.
Ukraine since March 2006 has had a pro-Russia parliament led by Regions.
Though control of the Ukrainian parliament appears set to shift, the narrow margin between the majority and the minority make dramatic changes in the former Soviet republic’s traditionally chaotic and frequently grid locked politics less than a sure thing, said Andrij Yermolaev, chairman of the Kiev-based Sofia political research institute.