Page 22 - bne_newspaper_September_08_2017

Opinion
September 8, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 22
KYIV BLOG: Poroshenko's low popularity creates opening for Kremlin in Ukraine's upcoming elections
Ben Aris in Berlin
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's political position has weakened dramatically over the last year with a recent poll finding that he has only a 2% popularity rating.
And it is not only Poroshenko that has a low ap- proval rating: all of Ukraine’s top politicians have “very favourable” ratings in single digits, which opens up an opportunity for the Kremlin to have a disproportional influence in the upcoming 2019 presidential elections if it chooses to interfere.
An opinion poll taken by the Sophia opinion re- search centre found that all the current adminis- tration leaders scored woefully low: Poroshenko’s popularity was around 2.0%, Prime Minister Vladimir Groysman’s ranking was 1.7%, and par- liament speaker Andrey Parubiy’s was 1.2%.
The low ratings have opened Poroshenko up to attack and former Rada deputies were calling for him to step down on September 4, suggesting if he doesn't go the parliament should impeach him.
"The demand for impeachment is a demand on the part of the entire nation," Vladimir Oleinik,
a former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada national parliament told Russian state-owned TASS news agency. "That’s a verdict issued by the whole of Ukrainian society because people are unable to tolerate this kind of power anymore."
The fact that Tass is reporting this story is in itself a problem for Poroshenko as Russia is expected
Ukrainian president Poroshenko's approval rating falls to 2%, creating opening for Kremlin in the upcoming elections
to interfere in the upcoming 2019 presidential elections and clearly it will support pro-Russia and anti-Poroshenko elements. Russia still has the ear of the population in the east of the coun- try, where people would rather see Ukraine join the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) than the European Union (EU), according to a recent poll by GfK. The situation is exactly the opposite in the west of the country.
Aside from Russia’s machinations, Poroshenko is genuinely unpopular. The GfK poll showed that both the president and his eponymous party is trailing behind opposition firebrand Yulia Ty- moshenko and if elections were held this Sunday it is unlikely that Poroshenko’s party would even clear the 5% threshold to enter the Rada. Ty- moshenko, a former prime minister, has come back from the political dead and would win both the parliamentary and presidential elections if they were held this weekend, the poll finds.
However, with only 11% of support in the poll for Tymoshenko and 10% for her party Batkivsh- chyna (Fatherland) party she also remains deeply unpopular. The real take-out from the poll is Ukrainians distrust all their leaders and voting in the election, as it stands at the moment, will be
a choice of the least-worst politician. Those that said they won’t vote at all in parliamentary elec- tions is nearly double Tymoshenko’s score at 19%, and another 29% don’t know what they would do.
The poll found that those that said they had