By DPA
Kiev : For Ukrainian democracy and elections, four times was the charm. Maybe.
Although ballots of the former Soviet republic’s latest national election were still being counted Sunday evening, exit polls made public shortly after voting ended showed two major pro-Europe political parties had just barely amassed enough popular support to form a clear majority together in the next Parliament.
It was the fourth national poll in three years.
The Block of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT) gained 31.5 percent of the popular vote, and Our Ukraine National Self Defence (OUNSD) pulled 13.4 percent, according to the survey of voters outside polling stations.
If ballot counts match poll predictions, the two parties will obtain 227 seats in Ukraine’s 450-seat Parliament, one seat more than a working majority, said Serhy Hadai, a political scientist.
According to the charismatic Yulia Tymoshenko herself, a formal coalition agreement between the two parties could be signed as early as Monday afternoon.
The ruling coalition parties of the last two years, the pro-big business Regions Ukraine and the Marxist Communist Party of Ukraine, appeared according to the poll results on track to become the opposition, receiving 35.2 and 5.1 percent respectively, which would give them some 48 percent of the seats in the legislature.
As ballot counting began, a fifth party headed by former parliament speaker Voldymyr Litvin was in a position to possibly obtain a few seats in the house as well, but even if it made the cut the group could not contribute sufficient seats to Regions to block a Tymoshenko-led coalition, pollsters predicted.
Political scientists on major Ukrainian news programmes widely agreed that a pro-Europe government with Tymoshenko as prime minister would be the likely result of the vote, but without exception they said that the coalition would need to overcome significant historical baggage to function effectively.
Last year, the very same two parties tried for five months to form a coalition and failed to do so, parting ways, among other issues, over Tymoshenko’s insistence that she become prime minister, amid a flurry of allegations in both directions of graft and corruption.
Less than a week before the Sunday vote, Tymoshenko made clear that the two sides would have to overcome some political distance to hammer out a common platform, pointing out that she was flatly opposed to allowing sale of land in Ukraine, while her potential junior coalition partner, OUNSD, supports it.
Another stumbling block could be a well-known Tymoshenko inclination, displayed during her 2004 premiership, to attempt win points with voters and take it to the oligarchs by freezing retail goods prices by government fiat – a violation of free-market principles anathema to the more orthodox OUNSD.
The coalition nonetheless would begin work with at least one major barrier to past alliances firmly removed, as Tymoshenko’s popularity demonstrated in the Sunday election makes her the obvious candidate for prime minister.
The two parties have common positions to join the European Union as soon as possible, and eventually NATO, too. Both support market reforms and want to attract foreign investment, and they agree on tax policies to move the burden from small business to big business.
Political scientist Myahilo Pohrebitsky in a television interview pulled no punches describing Tymoshenko’s new power in Ukrainian politics, calling her party’s success and her likely capture of the country’s number two job “a stunning and absolute victory”.
He cautioned that the tentative nature of exit polls and the small margin between a Tymoshenko-led coalition and a possible Regions-led opposition made it premature to firmly predict that she and her partners would control parliament.
Ukraine, in any case, appears to have achieved a dramatic democratic success, with all sides during the campaign playing mostly by internationally accepted election rules, and after the polls closed insisting that results be tabulated accurately, without resorting to major fraud as in the recent past.
Television news programmes and radio talk shows in the country were abuzz Sunday with the exit poll numbers and the potential implications for Ukrainian politics – much as would be expected in any Western European country after a close parliamentary election.