KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th May, 2019) The campaign for the early elections to the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, which will be held on July 21, officially starts on Friday.
The next elections to the Ukrainian parliament were scheduled to take place in October, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree dissolving the parliament on Tuesday and called for snap elections to be held at the end of July.
The reason for the dissolution was given as the absence of a ruling coalition, although a number of parliamentary groups consider this decision illegal. Ukrainian lawmakers have started collecting signatures to appeal the lawfulness of the presidential decree with the country's Constitutional Court. However, the Ukrainian Central Election Commission (CEC) stated that the appeal against the decree would not affect the electoral process.
According to experts, the early parliamentary elections are of greatest benefit to Zelensky's Servant of the People party, which could receive from 30 percent to 50 percent of the vote and form a one-party coalition in Rada. According to the latest polls, five parties can overcome the 5 percent threshold in early parliamentary elections.
Together with the decree on the dissolution of Rada, Zelensky suggested convening an extraordinary meeting of the parliament and changing the rules of the game in the upcoming elections. He introduced a bill that proposed to abolish the majority system and lower the entry threshold for parties from 5 percent to 3 percent. However, the parliament refused to consider the bill, arguing that the electoral system could not be changed two months before the elections.
Thus, early elections will be conducted on the basis of a mixed electoral system: half of the lawmakers, 225 people, will be elected by party lists, and the second half will be elected on the basis of a simple majority system in single-mandate election districts.
According to the constitution, the parliament is composed of 450 seats. However, fewer lawmakers will be elected, as it also happened in the last elections in 2014. The current composition of the parliament has 423 seats, as the elections were not conducted in some single-member Constituencies in Donbas and Crimea.
According to the schedule of the election campaign, compiled by the CEC, the nomination of candidates will begin on Friday. Candidates can be nominated by a party or through self-nomination.
Despite the fact that many parties in Rada have declared that the dissolution of the parliament was illegal, they are still going to run in the elections.
The party of ex-president Petro Poroshenko; the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party, headed by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko; the Opposition Platform � For Life party, and the Radical Party declared their readiness to take part in the elections.
Experts, interviewed by Sputnik, believe that the Servant of the People party will gain the majority of votes in the early elections, so it could choose with whom to form a coalition.
"The coalition will obviously be formed by Volodymyr Zelensky. Out of all forces that will get in, I think that there are chances if not to create a coalition with the Opposition Platform � For Life party, then at least build constructive relations with it," Ukrainian political analyst Yelena Dyachenko said.
According to her, there will be plenty of people willing to work with the new government in the new parliament.
The director of the Ukrainian Institute for Analysis and Management of Policy, Ruslan Bortnik, believes that the pro-presidential party will be the leader in the early elections.
"I think that Servant of the People party will be able to receive from 120 to 230 seats in the parliament, while the proportional component will most likely be 40 percent, or maybe even higher," Bortnik predicted.
He believes that if Zelensky's party fails to create a one-party coalition in the parliament, while it has every chance to get that, then the party's main partners could be the Batkivshchyna party, the Civil Position party, led by Former Minister of Defense Anatoliy Hrytsenko, or The Voice � the party of a famous Ukrainian singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk.
"But this will be a coalition with one and a half leading forces, where there will be one structure that is absolutely dominant and the second one that will be the support structure, which will be unable to claim much [power]," the political scientist specified.
At the same time, according to Bortnik, unexpected new political forces in the Ukrainian parliament are unlikely to appear, since two months is a very short time for an election campaign.
Bortnik predicted that, in addition to Vakarchuk, the Strength and Honor party of the former head of the Ukrainian Security Service, Ihor Smeshko, might also be among the new parties in the parliament. The political scientist also thinks that the "re-branded parts" of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and the People's Front party, led by the former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, will be among the parties that will get in the parliament.
According to a joint survey conducted by the Social Monitoring Center and the Ukrainian Institute of Social Research named after Alexander Yaremenko, five parties � the Servant of the People party, the Opposition Platform � For Life party, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc "Solidarity," the Batkivshchyna party and the Strength and Honor party � are likely to overcome the 5 percent barrier in the parliamentary elections.
Ukrainian sociological group Rating published the results of a survey, according to which, 43.8 percent of the country's population, the people who intend to vote, said they would vote for the Servant of the People party. The top five leaders also include the Opposition Platform � For Life party (10.5 percent), the Petro Poroshenko Bloc "Solidarity" (8.8 percent), the Batkivshchyna party (7.3 percent) and the Strength and Honor party (5.1 percent).
