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May 25, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 10
changed tack and backed Yanukovych when it became clear he was thinking of joining Russia’s Customs Union in 2013. Now it has put all its eggs in Poroshenko’s basket despite the current president’s clear hostility to introducing some key reforms. Only this week the International Monetary Fund (IMF) representative in Kyiv made it clear that more funding would only be made available if Kyiv makes progress on hiking domestic gas tariffs, ending the moratorium on land sales and setting up a anti-corruption court (ACC) – none of which are likely to happen, at least before the elections.
Ukraine’s economy collapsed after the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014 and the economy contracted by 15% in a year. Since then it has begun to recover, but rather than the bounce back and inbound flood of investment many were hoping for the growth has been anaemic and incomes in Ukraine remain the lowest in
the former Soviet space, lower even than such basket cases as Azerbaijan and Belarus.
The upshot is 71% of the population think the country is going in the wrong direction – a result that has remained more or less unchanged throughout the post revolutionary period. And those attitudes is pretty evenly distributed across the country and amongst all the age groups.
As for the changes in the last six months, less respondents thought the economic situation has gotten worse (69%) but that was only because the share that thought it was as bad as last
year has grown to 20% from 11% immediately following the revolution and economic collapse.
The distress the people are feeling will be expressed at the polls. Some 63% of the respondents said they would definitely or probably vote in the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 2019.
Currently Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party
is leading the polls with 9% of total possible voters followed by the Opposition bloc (the rump of Yanukovych’s former Party of Regions ruling party) with 5% that ties with Poroshenko’s party for second place.
Ukraine has a mixed system where 50% of seats are distributed under party lists with a
5% election threshold and 50% through first- past-the-post in single-member constituencies. Counting out the “won't votes” from the poll numbers and seven parties should enter parliament but stepping back it is clear that none of the parties have a clear lead over the others which will make it hard to hammer out any definitive policy in the new Rada.