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(Fatherland) party Yulia Tymoshenko. But while Tymoshenko had a strong and early lead, she has fallen back to third place in the most recent polls – and Ukraine’s polls are notoriously inaccurate to begin with.
Veteran emerging markets analyst Tim Ash, Senior Sovereign Strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, runs through what is known, what is likely, and what remains anyone’s guess in the upcoming elections.
Q&A on Ukraine
Ukraine goes to elections on March 31 for presidential, with likely a second round run-off vote three weeks later on April 21, and then parliamentary elections are due by October. I thought it perhaps useful to discuss how a foreign investor views this set of elections, and the Ukraine story.
Q? What do you make to these elections?
Answer: Well I think we should celebrate the fact that despite everything Ukraine has been through over the past few years, it remains a vibrant, functioning democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of the constitution and the election law, which has elements of the British “rotten borough” about it with the single mandate constituencies, which unduly benefit oligarchic business interests. But with 40-odd candidates, we have a genuinely contested presidential election, from, which we really don’t know who is going to emerge victorious. And unfortunately the trend in too many Emerging Market countries of late is in an entirely different direction, towards “managed democracy” or even more authoritarian rule – and sadly, too many people seem to be celebrating that as somehow optimal from a development perspective. I just don’t agree.
I think it is also refreshing when all the media talk is about a crisis in liberal Western market democracy, that opinion polls show strong support – two thirds – for Ukraine’s Western orientation, towards the European model with respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. This is despite difficult economic times: recession, devaluation, default, foreign annexation and invasion. Ukrainians are voting with their feet – well unfortunately actually many are doing literally that, with 4-5 million thought to be working overseas, mostly in the EU. But they know the model of development they want, and its orientation is Westwards.
Q? And what about the result, who is going to win?
Answer: No idea. I have now covered Ukraine for over thirty years and I hold my hand up and admit that these elections are genuinely impossible to call. But I guess my saving grace is that I am pretty sure that no one else either really knows who is going to win either.
I had been in the camp of thinking that Ukraine would benefit from a Macro factor, with a new fresh face emerging victorious. I thought that was the pop star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, but after much soul searching he opted not to run – shame. A fresh face could still win, but now that looks more likely to be the comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, but whose real orientation is much less easy to discern than that of Vakarchuk.
I try not to read that much into opinion polls in Ukraine, as they seem to be
9 UKRAINE Country Report March 2019 www.intellinews.com