The leader of Batkivshchyna party and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko confirmed on Oct. 13 what many were expecting: that she will run for the president of Ukraine. The election is scheduled for 2019.
Tymoshenko said on air on NewsOne TV station that she will run for president “to lift Ukraine from its knees.”
It will be the third time that Tymoshenko runs for president. She lost to ex-President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 and came second after current President Petro Poroshenko in May 25, 2014 election held after Yanukovych fled to Russia following the 100-day EuroMaidan Revolution.
Poroshenko is yet to officially announce if he will run for re-election. Ukrainian media, including Ukrainska Pravda, reported recently that his office was already preparing for the run.
Tymoshenko is one of the country’s most high-profile and long-running political figures. She entered politics in the 1990s as an ally of the scandalous ex-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who was convicted of money laundering, extortion and wire fraud. He served more than eight years in U.S. federal prison.
During her two decades in the Ukrainian politics, Tymoshenko has been a lawmaker, a prime minister, a presidential candidate, and a convict jailed for abuse of office by her political opponent.
Now Tymoshenko sees a realistic chance of getting into the country’s highest office, according to polls.
According to a poll taken in May by the Rating polling agency, Tymoshenko would get 12.4 percent of the votes if the election was held at the time, while Poroshenko would get only 9.5 percent.
A different poll by Social Monitoring Center and the Oleksandr Yaremenko Ukrainian Institute of Social Studies in July also put Tymoshenko slightly ahead of Poroshenko: 11.2 percent would prefer her as president, comparing to 9.5 percent who chose Poroshenko.
Twice prime minister
Tymoshenko was first elected to the Ukrainian parliament in 1996 and in 1999 was appointed deputy prime minister for fuel and energy under Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko.
Tymoshenko was one of the key politicians during the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought Viktor Yushchenko to power. Following the revolution, Yushchenko appointed Tymoshenko as prime minister in January 2005, but her cabinet was dismissed nine months later.
Tymoshenko became Ukraine’s prime minister for the second time after her party, the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, finished second in the 2007 parliamentary elections and formed a majority in parliament with Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and People’s Self-Defense, a party then led by the current Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
After Yanukovych came to power in 2010, defeating Tymoshenko by 3.5 percentage points, she was jailed in 2011 for abuse of power during the gas deal she brokered with Russia as prime minister.
Tymoshenko’s trial was denounced by the European Union as political persecution. She was released from prison in 2014, after the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Tymoshenko ran for the presidency in 2014, but lost to Poroshenko, who was elected with a resounding 55 percent first-round victory. Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna came in sixth in the parliamentary election in 2014, winning 19 seats. The party entered the ruling coalition immediately after the election, but left it in February 2016 and went into opposition.
Tymsoshenko also backed ex-Georgian President and governor of Odesa Oblast Mikheil Saakashvili, who was stripped of Ukrainian citizenship in July. However, Tymoshenko and Saakashvili have hinted that they were not planning to form a political union.
