Holos (Ukrainian: Голос, pronounced [ˈɦɔɫɔs] ⓘ), translated as Voice or Vote, is a liberal and pro-European political party in Ukraine, led by Kira Rudik.
What else, if not the voice?The party was presented to the public on 16 May 2019 in Kyiv and announced it would run in the upcoming July 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election.
[17] Legally, Holos is an "upgraded" version of the party "Platform of Initiatives" that was founded in 2015 to take part in the 2015 Ukrainian local elections.
[22][23] On 12 June, the party withdrew two of its constituency candidates because they had "affiliated with or co-operated with pro-Russian forces", namely Ukrainian Choice and the Opposition Bloc.
[33][34] In June 2021, 10 of the party's 20 MPs announced that they would create a separate association named Justice (Ukrainian: Справедливість; Spravedlyvist) and expressed their lack of confidence in faction leader Yaroslav Zhelezniak.
[37] The split was triggered by the decision of five of the party's MPs (including Rudyk and Zhelezniak) to vote in favour of the ruling party's initiative to delay the introduction of Ukrainian language quotas for the country's film industry; the dissenting MPs called this "betrayal" and a "vote for Russification".
[43] On 15 December 2021, Voice lost its appeal to the Supreme Court of Ukraine to rollback the January 2021 blocking of the payment of state funds to the party's accounts by the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC).
[47][48] In June 2024 the NACP stopped the national (state) funding of the party due to (alleged) incorrect information in its reports to amount of almost 5 million hryvnias.
[49] The Supreme Court of Ukraine confirmed the legality of the decision of the NACP to stop state funding of the party on 11 October 2024.
[56] According to experts from the Center for Economic Strategy Dmytro Yablonovsky and Daria Mikhailishin, the program focuses on combating corruption through de-oligarchization and by increasing the efficiency of the state through the introduction of modern technologies.
[59] On the morning of February 24, 2022, Holos faction was present in the Verkhovna Rada in full (except for one — MP Oleksandra Ustinova, who at that time was on a business trip) and voted for the draft laws[60] important for security and defense of Ukraine.
Since February 24, Holos has been actively working in the Verkhovna Rada, in local representative offices, and at the level of inter-parliamentary diplomacy.
In particular, in June 2024, the ALDE Council in Vilnius[66] adopted a document on unquestioning support for Ukraine, in which European liberals called to: