Ukraine’s knife-edge campaign enters last day

27 Oct 2012, 3:28 pm   -   Source: AAP

Ukraine's opposition and the party of President Viktor Yanukovych make a final push for votes on the last day of campaigning before the country's tightly-contested parliamentary polls.

Ukraine's opposition and the party of President Viktor Yanukovych on Friday made a final push for votes on the last day of campaigning before the country's tightly-contested weekend parliamentary polls.
  
Sunday's ballot to the Verkhovna Rada parliament has been marked by Western prodding of the authorities over the absence of the controversially jailed opposition leader and ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko.
  
But the opposition has refused to be demoralised and rallied in the closing stages around the intriguing candidacy of heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko -- a charismatic speaker who campaigns against corruption with his aptly-named UDAR (Punch) group.
  
The government meanwhile vowed to conduct fair elections in the nation of 46 million -- occupying the strategic edge between Russia and eastern EU states -- with the help of monitoring cameras and the Internet.
  
"All these tales and stories about how the vote can be falsified -- this is simply impossible because of the technology," Prime Minister Mykola Azarov told reporters while inspecting the new equipment at a Kiev polling station.
  
Campaigning is banned on Saturday and both Tymoshenko's forces and Azarov's Regions party held colourful rallies filled with famous pop concert singers late Friday aimed at securing the support of swing wavering voters.
  
Azarov told a group of a few hundred in the late autumn chill that the ruling Regions Party was filled with "doers rather than talkers... who support pro-business practices."
  
The polls have given voters a chance to voice their frustration with a generation of leaders who had promised change in the 2004 Orange Revolution in which Tymoshenko -- her blond braid prominent on protest posters -- played a leading part.
  
Nearly a decade of subsequent infighting between government clans that came amid economic stagnation and wide-scale reports of abuses appear to be coming to a head in Ukraine just in time for Sunday's ballot.
  
The stain of corruption has also touched Tymoshenko -- her popularity low in her own premiership -- as her coalition struggles to secure second place against the strong reception awarded to the anti-graft campaign of Klitschko.
  
The Regions Party's lead may be challenged after the election as the opposition mulls a long-discussed alliance and the ruling party relies on the shrinking Communist vote for support.
  
A poll conducted by an independent pollster published Friday by the Ukrainska Pravda Internet newspaper showed the president's party ahead of Tymoshenko's alliance 26 to 21 percent.
  
UDAR was in strong third with 18 percent while the Communists trailed in fourth with 10 percent. The nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) was the only other party to sneak past the five-percent minimum threshold with 5.6 percent of the vote.
  
The pollster's name was not revealed as the publication of such polls is not allowed inside Ukraine in the run-up to the vote.
  
A study released by the reputed Voters Committee of Ukraine (KIU) analysis centre said these elections were the dirtiest since the historic presidential 2004 vote that sparked the Orange Revolution and was later annulled.
  
It noted that the going rate for votes was 150-200 hryvnas ($18 to $25) -- double that in some regions where the vote was particularly close.
  
In a potentially tense stand-off, the opposition and the ruling party set up rival rallies of 10,000 people each in central Kiev on election day. Tymoshenko's was scheduled to last through the night even as the votes were being counted.
  
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top EU diplomat Catherine Ashton published an extremely rare joint appeal on the eve of the vote in which they called on Yanukovych to prove his democratic credentials.
  
"We are concerned about reports of the use of administrative resources to favour ruling party candidates and the difficulties several media outlets face," they said in a letter published in the International Herald Tribune.

Ukraine

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