Editor’s Note: Election Watch is a regular update on the state of the presidential race in Ukraine. The country will elect its next president on March 31, 2019, with a possible runoff on April 21. The Election Watch project is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. The donor doesn’t influence the content. Go to kyivpost.com for more election coverage.
The official presidential campaign — which by Ukrainian law lasts only three months — has passed its midpoint.
With that milestone, the fight for the country’s top office grew nastier, with candidates and their staffers now facing criminal investigations. That, in turn, has spawned accusations that law enforcement agencies are intruding on the campaign.
State of the race
The general picture of the race hasn’t changed significantly since early February, when polls revealed that actor and first-time candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy had taken a lead.
The latest poll, conducted by the Razumkov Center think tank on Feb. 7–14 and published on Feb. 20, shows the same three leaders as before: Zelenskiy, incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
According to the poll, 19 percent of those who say they will vote in the election support Zelenskiy for the presidency. Poroshenko receives 16.8 percent of respondents’ votes, while Tymoshenko gets 13.8 percent.
Until Zelenskiy announced his bid for the presidency and started campaigning in January, Tymoshenko had led the polls for months. However, long before his announcement, pollsters had included Zelenskiy in the polls and he frequently showed up among the top three candidates. But his true leap in popularity came in late January.
Back in mid-2018, ex-Defense Minister Anatoliy Grytsenko often registered as the frontrunner. Since then, his poll ratings have decreased significantly. In the Feb. 20 poll, he took fourth place with 7.3 percent of decided voters.
All three top candidates—Zelenskiy, Poroshenko, and Tymoshenko — have supporters concentrated in different regions of the country.
According to the Razumkov Center, Zelenskiy receives higher support in the central and southern parts of Ukraine. Poroshenko’s and Tymoshenko’s support is higher in the west and the center.
Helpful Lutsenko
On Feb. 20, lawmaker Ivan Vinnyk, who heads a parliamentary commission for investigating embezzlement in the army in 2004–2017, said that the Prosecutor General’s Office had opened a criminal probe into all former defense ministers who occupied the office during those years.
The news received significant attention because that group of ministers includes presidential candidate Grytsenko.
Grytsenko was defense minister in 2005–2007 under President Viktor Yushchenko. Besides him, eight other people held the post in the 2004– 2017 period, and two more served briefly as acting minister. Now, all of them are subject to an investigation.
Grytsenko called the parliamentary commission’s investigation of the suspected embezzlement “a dirty PR show.”
Grytsenko has been highly critical of Poroshenko, his competitor in the race, and especially of Poroshenko’s ally, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
Just two weeks before news of the embezzlement investigation broke, Lutsenko and Grytsenko had a public confrontation.
Grytsenko said the prosecutor general had “hidden” his son from army service — something the former defense minister later admitted was incorrect. Lutsenko took offense. Both exchanged accusations and insults. Lutsenko’s wife, Iryna Lutsenko — a lawmaker and Poroshenko’s representative in parliament — also joined the fray: She filed a defamation suit against Grytsenko and lambasted the ex-minister on political talk shows.
Tymoshenko in trouble
Grytsenko isn’t the only presidential candidate who has recently attracted the attention of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Lutsenko also ordered the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to look into Tymoshenko’s connections to two U.S. lobbying firms that were hired by a third party to represent her interests. Tymoshenko said she didn’t know who hired the firms and refused to cooperate with them. However, during Tymoshenko’s trip to Washington, D.C. in December, at least one of her meetings was arranged by one of the firms she denied working with.
In her official asset declaration, Tymoshenko did not indicate that she spent any money on lobbying services or that she received such services as a gift.
Tymoshenko criticized Lutsenko, claiming he was doing a favor for Poroshenko, who appointed him to his post. Earlier, Lutsenko publicly supported Poroshenko’s presidential bid in violation of a law that bans public officials from showing support for political forces.
“My friendly advice to Lutsenko is to go on vacation for the election period,” Tymoshenko said in a statement on Feb. 15. “Otherwise, it’s awkward: first he passionately backs Poroshenko, then he launches farfetched cases against (Poroshenko’s) opponents.”
Lutsenko’s spokeswoman Larysa Sargan said later the same day her boss had no time for vacation, as well as for playing “political games.”
Lutsenko said on Feb. 18 that “guaranteeing that the presidential election is fair is the main task (for Prosecutor General’s Office for the next few months.”
Rigging the vote?
Tymoshenko’s trouble didn’t end there.
Since the start of 2019, the former prime minister has been accusing Poroshenko of preparing to rig the March 31 presidential vote.
She claimed to know of two such plans. First, she claimed that Poroshenko’s people were preparing to bribe voters directly, paying Hr 1,000 ($37) per vote.
Second, she claimed that the Central Election Commission reported an increase in the number of registered voters and this meant that Poroshenko was preparing to rig the vote by using fake voters. In fact, the number of registered voters remained almost unchanged since the 2014 presidential election: it went from 30 million to 29.9 million people.
Poroshenko’s party headquarters denied these accusations and said Tymoshenko was “desperately trying to stop her ratings from falling.”
But Feb. 21 brought an unexpected twist for Tymoshenko. The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, a top security agency subordinate to Poroshenko, said it uncovered a network of people working in what it termed “an electoral pyramid scheme aiming to guarantee the victory of a certain presidential candidate.” The SBU said that scheme was led by a member of parliament.
It wasn’t clear from the SBU statement whether the purpose of the network was to directly bribe the voters or just to pay a large number of unofficial agents to advocate for Tymoshenko. The scheme supposedly aimed to reach 600,000 people.
While the SBU didn’t name the candidate who would supposedly benefit from the scheme, some evidence points to Tymoshenko. Earlier that day, Tymoshenko campaign representatives in Zaporizhia Oblast said that SBU agents searched the homes of campaign employees. Tymoshenko herself wasn’t available for comment by the time this story went to print.
A member of the Zaporizhya city council from Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party, Vitaliy Ryabtsev, said he witnessed the searches. He posted about it on social media, accusing Poroshenko of ordering the raid for political purposes. “Law enforcement agencies de facto serve the campaign of the incumbent president,” Ryabtsev said.
