Elections in Ukraine

Elections in Ukraine are held to choose the president (head of state), Verkhovna Rada (legislature), and local governments.

Elections in Ukraine are held to choose the President (head of state) and Verkhovna Rada (legislature).

The Verkhovna Rada has 450 members and is also elected for a five-year term, but may be dissolved earlier by the president in the case of a failure to form a government.

[10] Presidential candidates must have had residence in Ukraine for the past ten years prior to election day.

[12] A party is (since late February 2016) also allowed to excluded people from its electoral list of the last parliamentary elections.

In the elections since 2002 voters of Western and Central Ukrainian oblasts voted mostly for parties (Our Ukraine, Batkivshchyna, UDAR, Self Reliance, Radical Party, Petro Poroshenko Bloc and the People's Front) and presidential candidates (Viktor Yushchenko, Yulia Tymoshenko) with a pro-Western and state reform platform, while voters in Southern and Eastern oblasts of Ukraine voted for parties (CPU, Party of Regions and Opposition Bloc) and presidential candidates (Viktor Yanukovych) with a pro-Russian and status quo platform.

[28][22][29] Till the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election the electorate of CPU and Party of Regions was very loyal to them.

[36] This figure was determined after the Central Electoral Commission deducted the eligible voters in areas were voting was impossible.

[39] According to Tadeusz Olszański, of the Centre for Eastern Studies, the low turnout in Donetsk Oblast (and also Luhansk Oblast) is explained by the end of an artificial increase of voter turnout there by Party of Regions officials.

To this day Kravchuk and Petro Poroshenko are the only presidential candidates who won the elections after the first round obtaining over 50% of votes, respective in 1991 and 2014.

[43] Early May 2009, the "Committee of Voters of Ukraine" stated they believe that the use of the state's administrative resources by political forces for their own national and local election campaigns is no longer a decisive factor in the outcome of Ukrainian elections.

[45] But according to (then) Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov these elections "were absolutely without the use of administrative resources, naturally.