Mayors are big winners

The main winners in the elections were incumbent mayors in the biggest cities, which largely managed to hold on to their seats.

The mayors of Ukraine’s seven-largest cities gained the most votes, some of them exceeding the 50% threshold and allowing them to win in the first round.

Under the new election laws, local elections are held primarily according to the party list system, with 5% thresholds for representation on local councils. Settlements with fewer than 10,000 people will still use single-mandate districts.

The main race was for control of the city hall in Kyiv, where the ex-boxing champion Vladimir Klitschko was defending his position. Klitschko announced he had contracted coronavirus (COVID-19) shortly before the vote, but still managed to win re-election in the first round with 50.6% of the vote after 99.5% of the ballots were counted.

Klitschko easily beat Oleksandr Popov, his predecessor and candidate from the pro-Putin Opposition Platform For Life Party, who won 8.6% of the vote, according to the exit poll of the Rating Sociological Group.

In the vote for the Kyiv city council – the more important body as it is the one that actually spends the money – the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform led by Klitschko earned about 21.3% of votes, while former President Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity Party, led by his wife Maryna Poroshenko, took about 18%. The president’s SOTP, led by Yevhenia Kuleba, came in third with about 9.5%, according to the Rating exit poll.

SOTP did poorly in all the important regional city races, which will undermine its grip on the Rada, where it is already facing increased opposition as rival groups, many of them backed by powerful oligarchs, are actively working against the SOTP fraction and persuading its deputies to leave the fraction.

In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, mayor Hennadiy Kernes won re-election with 57.9% of the vote, followed by Oleksandr Feldman with 12.1%, the exit poll said.

In Odesa, Ukraine’s third-largest city, incumbent mayor Gennady Trukhanov also won with 34.6% of the vote, but will now face a run-off against Mykola Skoryk of the pro-Putin Opposition Platform who took 17.7%.

In Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, Borys Filatov took 44.4% of the vote, followed by Zahid Krasnov of The People’s Servant Party with 14.4%.

“The biggest story of these local elections, which was expected, is the surge in support for local leaders and parties above national ones. All four mayors re-elected in Ukraine’s largest cities lead their own local parties that have no presence in Parliament. Moreover, they are not capable [of] competing for Parliament. But they are very popular at the local level, which is a unique phenomenon in Ukrainian politics,” according to Concorde Capital’s Zawada.

The success of the local mayors is a feature of the decentralisation of power, which has been one of the most successful reforms implemented since the 2014 Euromaidan revolution.

More than 1,400 newly merged communities have been formed since 2014, which have more resources, decision-making authority, and power that has been delegated from Kyiv to solve local community problems. the decentralisation process has been pushed on Kyiv by its Western donor partners as a way to improve local government and reduce corruption.

While the polls show the population is very unhappy with the national government – the last poll found two thirds of Ukrainians believe the country is going in the “wrong direction” – the same polls find the opposite is true of attitudes to local government, where they are very happy.

Local leaders have focused on things like collecting the rubbish, lighting the streets, funding the schools and repairing the roads to the widespread approval of the local populations. A similar phenomenon is seen in Russia, although there it is less noticeable and less successful when compared to Ukraine.

Turnout and Hungarian interference

Voter turnout was decent, but not astronomical at 37%, compared with 46.6% in the 2015 local elections, according to the Central Election Commission, which cited the COVID-19 pandemic as a major source for the drop in turnout. One fifth of registered voters said they didn’t participate owing to health reasons, according to the Rating sociological group.

The election was deemed to be free and fair, although some abuses were reported including: carousel voting schemes, and insufficient voting booths and ballot boxes.

One smallish scandal involved the Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, who called upon ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine to vote for the candidates of a particular party, the Association of Hungarian Culture in Zakarpattia.

Ukraine is home to a large ethnic Hungarian population that lives along the Ukrainian side of the border. This population was negatively affected by former President Petro Poroshenko's drive to ban “foreign languages” in public life and schools as part of his nationalistic driven rhetoric. While Poroshenko’s rules were aimed at Russophiles, the Hungarian community was caught up in the crossfire that generated much resentment. The scandal deepened when the Hungarian consulate in the region was caught handing out Hungarian passports to the locals. Relations between Budapest and Kyiv have been tense since.

Szijjarto also called for the residents of the town of Berehovo to re-elect its ethnic Hungarian mayor, Zoltan Babiak. He encouraged Ukrainian citizens living in Hungary to cross the border to vote, stating they would not be required to undergo a 14-day quarantine. All of this drew a strong rebuke from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, which accused Hungary of interfering in its domestic politics.

“Budapest’s ignoring of numerous calls by Kyiv to stop abusing the principles of rule of law and neighbourly relations, and to respect Ukraine’s laws,” the statement said. “Unpleasant suggestions to voters by Budapest violate Ukrainian legislation and don’t leave the Ukrainian side another choice than harshly reacting to such steps according to established international practice and the legislation of Ukraine.”

National poll conducted in parallel

In parallel to the regional vote Zelenskiy organised a poll to answer five questions. This poll was partly a pre-election stunt, as the debate it engendered allowed the Zelenskiy team to take control of the media coverage ahead of the election as it drip-fed questions into the public sphere, and to control of debate.

Some of the questions themselves were criticised for being vague and/or meaningless, rather than forming the basis of some sort of referendum to provide the president’s office with an agenda going forward. A third of those that voted said they ignored the poll, according to the Rating Sociological Group.

81% of those who responded to the first question: “do you support life in prison sentences for those involved in large scale corruption?” said they agree. About 45% of respondents said they support creating a free trade zone in the Donbas region, about 95% support reducing the number of MPs to 300, from 450 currently, about 70% support legalising cannabis for medical use and 78% support raising Ukraine’s security guarantees in the Budapest Memorandum.

“As expected, these elections will be declared free and fair by election observers, and meeting international standards. Zelenskiy’s national poll was too poorly organised to be taken seriously. It will be soon forgotten, given how few participated overall and how easily multiple ballots could have been cast,” Zenon Zawada of Concorde Capital said in a note.