Page 6 - UKRRptOct18

On the political front the election season is now in full swing ahead of the March presidential elections and Ukraine’s presidential election polls vary widely on candidate’s popularity.
This is not going to be a clean election as firstly a deal has to be struck with the various oligarchs that between them wholly own Ukraine’s press and TV. Secondly Kyiv-based investment bank Concorde Capital has suggested that President Petro Poroshenko is funding some polls that down play the lead opposition leader, former Prime Minister and head of Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party Yulia Tymoshenko has over him. Two polls have come out in the last week of September that show radically different results and the differences between them are out side their statistical margins of error.
Tymoshenko continues to command a big ten point lead over Poroshenko in the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) poll, one of the most reliable. According to the Ukrainians who have already made their choice, Tymoshenko increased her lead by two points on earlier polls to 19.3%, with another 11.9% prepared to vote for incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, who has also improved his position by three points now his campaign has started in earnest.
However, despite the jiggery pokery, at this point it seems highly likely that Tymoshenko will win the first round but has no hope of clearing the 50% barrier to win out right and so it will go to second round where it is very likely she will face Poroshenko. Who would win that race remains anyone’s guess at the moment. While Tymoshenko and Poroshenko are the country’s two leading politicians they are also both divisive figures: they lead both the popularity polls but also the “won’t support under any circumstances” polls, which will hurt them both in a second round vote.
2.0 Politics
2.1 Tymoshenko increases her lead in presidential election polls
Yulia Tymoshenko, the nation's two-time former prime minister and head of the Batkivshchyna parliamentary faction, has increased her lead in the polls in the race for the presidency ahead of next year’s vote, according to a survey conducted in August by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation together with the Razumkov Center.
Tymoshenko, who was the first politician in the war-torn country to officially announce a bid in the 2019 presidential elections, saw her rating increase to 17.8% according to respondents who intend to vote. In May Tymoshenko’s rating was 13.3%, according to the survey.
Anatoliy Hrytsenko, leader of the Civil Position party, came next in the presidential rating with 8.4%, while the incumbent President Petro Poroshenko has 7.9%.
Meanwhile, Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, frontman of Ukraine's iconic rock group Okean Elzy, who also one of the most popular non-politicians in the country, would score 5.6% of the votes. Recently, Vakarchuk, released a song hinting at a possible run for the nation's presidential post in next year’s elections,
6 UKRAINE Country Report October 2018 www.intellinews.com