Kyiv elects a mayor for the first time since 2008

According
to the exit poll by Savik Shuster Studio political
talk show, Vitali Klitschko won 57 percent of the vote, leaving the runner-up Lesya Orobets  far behind with 10 percent of the vote.

The
capital has lived without a mayor for the last two years since Leonid
Chernovetsky, the city’s last elected mayor, resigned on June 1,
2012. He had been absent from Kyiv’s political scene for more than
six months before his resignation, allowing a presidential appointee
to run the city. The Kyiv city council’s legal five-year term
expired in June of 2013.

Since
that time the council’s secretary Halyna Hereha, a business tycoon
and wife of the Party of Regions lawmaker Oleksandr Hereha, was
acting as city major. Until recently she ran the city along with
Oleksandr Popov, an appointed head of Kyiv State Administration.

In
the last two years the ruling Party of Regions kept sabotaging local
elections in Kyiv through an array of legal means because its
popularity had vanished. Previously, the Regions and allies
controlled the 120-seat council. Now, power has shifted to
Klitschko’s UDAR, which got 42 percent of the votes, according to
Shuster Studio’s exit poll. A handful of smaller parties have also
won seats.

Klitschko,
who competed against 18 other candidates, said his main priority was
corruption fight. “To fight corruption, the government has to be
transparent. If all decisions are taken transparently and the
authorities are accountable to the community, I am convinced there
will be no space left for corruption,” he said in the first speech
after the polls closed.

Klitschko
will have to work with a council, where half the deputies were
elected through the party ballot, and the other half through
individual votes in their constituencies. Kyivans had to choose from
1,500 candidates in total running in all constituencies. There were
35 political parties competing for seats also, but only those who
crossed a three-percent threshold will get into the city legislature.

List
of parties that have won seats in Kyiv city council

UDAR
42.3

Radical
Party (of Oleg Liashko) 7.9

Svoboda
7.7

Samopomich
(Self-aid, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy’s party) 7.4

Batkivshchyna
4.7

New
Life (Olesya Orobets) 4.1

Democratic
Alliance (Vasyl Gatsko) 3.7

Civic
Position (Anatoliy Hrytsenko) 3.5

Unity
3.4

Source:
Savik Shuster Studio

The
new Kyiv mayor and the city council are elected for less than a year
and a half. According to election legislation, the next elections of
a Kyiv mayor and the city council will be held in the fall of 2015.
Then the Kyiv mayor will serve for four years and the city council
will be elected for a five-year term.

Kyiv
territorial election commission is expected to publish the official
results of mayoral elections by May 31.

Kyiv
Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be reached at trach@kyivpost.com