Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko accepted her defeat at the March 31 presidential election though she claimed it wasn’t a fair play.
Tymoshenko received about 13 percent of the vote based on the data from 99 percent of election protocols, being behind political satirist Volodymyr Zelenskiy with 30 percent and President Petro Poroshenko with 15.9 percent of votes.
Tymoshenko claimed Poroshenko overtook her using several unfair methods.
“He (Poroshenko) shouldn’t be in the second round, he got there in an unfair way,” she told the press on April 2 in her office, wearing the same red dress she had during her party congress that nominated her for the presidency in January. She looked sad but determined.
Ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko speaks during a press conference in her office in Kyiv on Apr. 2, 2019. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Tymoshenko said Poroshenko defeated her thanks to paying cash pension supplements in a month before the vote, paying additional Hr 1,000 from local budgets to his supporters in a way of one-time benefits for needy people and using her namesake Yuriy Tymoshenko as a clone candidate.
Little known Yuriy Tymoshenko, whose name was next to Yulia Tymoshenko in voting ballots, managed to receive 0.62 percent of votes (more than 166,000 votes.)
Tymoshenko received some 400,000 fewer votes than Poroshenko, according to the data from 99 percent of protocols.
Tymoshenko also said her team noticed suspiciously high turnout at some polling stations, where most votes received Poroshenko. She also claimed that many voting ballots for her were deliberately found invalid. There were 1.8 percent of invalid voting ballots, according to the recent data of the Central Election Commission.
Most of the Ukrainian and foreign election observers, however, found the election on March 31 fair and competitive.
Tymoshenko said she wasn’t going to complain into court as she did in 2010 challenging her defeat at the presidential election to Viktor Yanukovych. Tymoshenko said she doesn’t believe Ukrainian courts. “Incumbent president has privatized the system of justice,” she said. “We will just lose out time there.”
She also refused from calling on her supporters to the streets saying it may play into the hands of Russia.
It was the third time Tymoshenko tried herself at the presidential election after 2010 when she was second after Yanukovych, and 2014, when she was second after Poroshenko.
Tymoshenko said that now she would focus of parliamentary elections in late October and would try to implement through parliament her political program that includes granting less power to the president and more to the prime minister, or chancellor, as Tymoshenko proposes.
She endorsed neither Zelenskiy nor Poroshenko for the second round and didn’t even advise her supporters on whether they should come to the polling stations for the run-off on April 21.
“I believe that neither candidate who got into the second round would be able to answer the challenges“ Ukraine has, she said. She added her team will, however, watch over the run-off “in order that none could falsify the election.”
A reformist lawmaker on March 31 reported the teams of Zelenskiy and Tymoshenko were negotiating on possible cooperation through both Tymoshenko and Zelenskiy later denied these talks.
Poroshenko in a video comment to Censor.net website published on April 2 said he wasn’t going to “comment a tragedy of Yulia Volodymyrivna.” “She should accept this,” he said, and even praised her for being a “good political leader.”
Poroshenko, who received twice fewer votes than Zelenskiy in the first round, now desperately needs the support of Tymoshenko’s voters to win a run-off.
