Groysman says he will run for seat in parliament in 2019

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said he will stand in the next parliamentary election, planned for the fall 2019.

Making the announcement in a Twitter post on April 19, Groysman refueled long-running rumors that he might be breaking away from the camp of President Petro Poroshenko, who brought him into power as his protégé in 2014 and made him prime minister two years later.

After two years in the government’s top seat, the wording of Groysman’s announcement suggested that he wants to run to parliament separately from Poroshenko’s political grouping, the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko.

“I want to take faithful people with me (to the parliament). People who will change Ukraine for better with concrete decisions,” Groysman wrote on Twitter.

It is unclear whether Groysman plans to lead a new party of his own or take a top place in the People’s Front, the party with the second-biggest faction in parliament after the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko. But there are signs that he might opt for joining the People’s Front.

The party, headed by ex-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has 81 seats in the Verkhovna Rada, and is the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko’s only partner in a very shaky coalition.

Groysman has spoken warmly of his predecessor Yatsenyuk. And in November Groysman put in an appearance at the party’s convention in Kyiv.

Groysman’s spokesperson Vasyl Ryabchuk refused to deny or confirm the rumors about Groysman’s ties with People’s Front, or say if it the prime minister is starting a new party.

“The people (Groysman works with) will be faithful to Ukraine,” Ryabchuk said in a written comment to the Kyiv Post on April 20, refusing to give more information.

Before announcing his intention to run for parliament, the prime minister made it known he doesn’t want to run for president in the election scheduled for March 2019.

But Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said Groysman’s ambitions may soon cost him his prime minister’s seat, and he declared that he isn’t running for president as a safety measure.

“(If he had said he would run for president) he would have become a competitor of Poroshenko, and would definitely lose the prime minister’s chair,” Fesenko told the Kyiv Post.

That would be too risky for Groysman, as according to the latest presidential poll, published by Kyiv International Sociology Institute in March, Groysman is polling at only some 4.2 percent. The leaders in the poll were Batkivshchyna party leader Yulia Tymoshenko with 24 percent, and Radical Party leader Oleg Lyashko with 15 percent. Poroshenko came fourth with 9.8 percent.

“That is why he wants to stay prime minister, with the hope of working until the parliamentary election and increasing his rating,” Fesenko said.

Groysman responded to rumors of his possible dismissal on April 13, telling Ukraine’s ICTV television station that neither People’s Front nor the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko were planning to call a vote for his dismissal.

His own party?

The two parties in the current coalition both have low approval ratings. The People’s Front has less than 1 percent of voters’ support, while the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko has slightly more – 2.7 percent, according to the latest poll by the Kyiv International Sociology Institute, published in March.

For this reason, Fesenko said, Groysman is unlikely to choose to join either of the existing parties.

“One possible scenario is that some people from Poroshenko’s and Yatsenyuk’s parties will join Groysman’s new political force. They understand that both parties have little chance of forming a majority in the next parliament,” Fesenko said.

Fesenko said that Vinnytsya European Strategy, a local political party that took part in the 2015 local elections in Ukraine, could be the basis for Groysman’s new political party.

Only a month before the 2015 local elections, Groysman, then the speaker of parliament, presented Vinnytsya European Strategy in Vinnytsya. Just a month later it won Vinnytsya local elections, beating even local branch of the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, taking the majority of seats in the city council.

“They have a history of rapid success at the regional level. They can simply rename and go to the parliament elections as just European Strategy, with Groysman first on the party list, the leader,” Fesenko said.

Fast rise

Groysman, 40, was hardly known in Ukrainian politics until the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, when Poroshenko lobbied for him to be made deputy prime minister in the post EuroMaidan temporary government headed by Yatsenyuk.

Groysman has been Poroshenko’s protégé since the president financed his first political campaign and helped the then local businessman become the mayor of Vinnytsya, a city in central Ukraine, in 2006.

Allegedly, that in turn helped people from Poroshenko’s circle to assume total control in Vinnytsya, and make it a political power base and the center of his business interests.

Groysman entered parliament in 2014 as number four on the party list of the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko Party.

Poroshenko’s party came second after the People’s Front. The parties shared out the top government and parliament posts between them.

Groysman became Rada speaker, and managed the Ukrainian parliament until April 14, 2016, when he was appointed the prime minister of Ukraine after Yatsenyuk’s resignation.

In the government, mostly divided between People’s Front and the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, Groysman has managed to secure places in the cabinet for several of his political allies, including Volodymyr Kistion as the regional development and housing minister, Andriy Reva as the social policy minister, and Oleksandr Sayenko as the minister of the Cabinet of Ministers.

Groysman has quickly adapted to top government in Kyiv.

In 2016, Schemes, an investigative TV show of Radio Liberty reported that Groysman, who moved to Kyiv from Vinnytsya only in 2014, already has two apartments and two parking spots worth $681,000 in a luxury residential complex, NovoPecherski Lypki, registered to his mother in law – an elderly woman who also lived in Vinnytsya.

In the latest electronic declaration, Groysman disclosed earning more than Hr 17 million in 2017. That was even more than Poroshenko, who disclosed that he earned Hr 15 million from interest on deposits.

Groysman made some of his money last year by selling real estate worth Hr 8.8 million to a private company called Magigrand, of which his wife Olena Groysman is a beneficiary, according to the prime minister’s e-declaration.

And that was not the first time Groysman has sold real estate to his wife’s firm. Online news site Ukrainska Pravda reported that Groysman sold property worth Hr 8 million to Magigrand in 2016.