Page 11 - UKRRptDec18

by now.
The renewal of cooperation with the IMF (pending the approval of the 2019 state budget) unlocks loans from the World Bank and the EU to cover the budget deficit. Those loans will allow the government to service maturing debt, but will not leave room for any fiscal loosening, which will be a good disciplining factor ahead of the elections.
Ukraine’s ability to smoothly roll over its maturing debt in 2019 and 2020 will depend on its ability to maintain uninterrupted cooperation with the IFIs. This should help ensure that the winners of the next year’s election will be less likely to roll back the recent changes and instead to stick by Ukraine’s recent commitments.
Factoring in the first tranche of the IMF loan and funding from other IFIs, we confirm our projection for end-2018 NBU reserves of c. $19bn.
2.5 Tymoshenko massively outspending rivals in 2019 presidential race
Opposition leader, former Prime Minister and head of Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party Yulia Tymoshenko is spending over seven-times as much as her main rival in the 2019 presidential election, incumbent President Petro Poroshenko.
With campaigning in full swing for the 2019 presidential elections in March, the leading parties are ramping up their spending, but the popularist firebrand has already pulled out all the stops and is massively outspending the rest of the field on promotional advertising.
The front runner in the polls with about a 10 point lead over most of her rivals, Tymoshenko ramped up her ad-spend over 200-fold in the second quarter of this year from the first quarter and has officially already spent nearly a million dollars. Most of the other parties have spent around two hundred thousand dollars each so far.
Kyiv has been under a forest of posters portraying Tymoshenko for months already, but the other candidates are starting to get into the game now, although the official campaign season does not open until the end of December.
Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party has already spent more than UAH25mn ($885,000) on advertising and media activities in the second quarter of 2018, which is 206-times more than in the previous reporting period, according to Natalia Korchak, a member of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, who has been tracking ad-spending, Ukrinform reports .
The party’s involvement in the campaign is important, as Ukraine will also hold parliamentary elections in October, which are at least as important as the presidential elections in March.
"The Batkivshchyna Party has become very active in financing such activities. Maybe, this was due to the program represented by Tymoshenko," Korchak
11 UKRAINE Country Report December 2018 www.intellinews.com