Congresses of Ukrainian parties to name presidential candidates

Congresses of four largest Ukrainian parties Batkivshchyna, UDAR, Svoboda (Freedom) and the Party of Regions will be held in Kiev on Saturday to name their candidates for the early Ukrainian presidential elections planned for May 25.

For the Party of Regions (PR), formerly the country's leading, the vote will be a test to regain voter confidence. The Regionals are experiencing the hardest time in their history. Viktor Yanukovich on Friday asked his fellow party members to relieve him of the powers of the party's honorary chairman and quitted the ranks. The party's Chairman Nikolai Azarov is not in the country. Thus, the Regionals have to elect their new leadership before nominating candidates. However, according to experts, the party will not have one obvious leader in the near future, and the main governing bodies will be the political council and the board (presidium). The political council will consist of deputies and leaders of regional organizations, and in the board will be seven to ten people, four of whom will represent the key regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov.

The self-nomination of four presidential candidates Sergei Tigipko, Mikhail Dobkin, Yuri Boiko and Oleg Tsarev indicates discord in the PR, analysts say. Parliament member Vadim Kolesnichenko from the Party of Regions told Itar-Tass that the party's leader in the Supreme Rada Alexander Yefremov also intended to run for the presidency.
Nevertheless, each of the self-nominees hopes for congress support. According to sociologists, Tigipko enjoys the highest rating among the candidates, who, by the way, is not reluctant to take the seat of the party's head. In the presidential elections in 2010, Tigipko, who was the leader of the party Strong Ukraine, was the third after Yulia Timoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich. After that, he was vice-premier for two years, but after the parliamentary elections in 2012, he was not included in the government and had only a seat of a deputy.

It is not the best time either for Batkivshchyna. Leader Yulia Timoshenko, who has decided to run for the presidency, has become a stumbling block. After being released from prison, she decided to quickly take the reins in her hands and attempted to form a pool of reliable advisers around her. But as it has turned out, not all her comrades in arms agreed to work for the leader. When Timoshenko was absent, the Batkivshchyna forces were reformated, and many did not hope she would be released before the presidential elections. Moreover, there was a backroom agreement between Arseny Yatsenyuk, Alexander Turchinov, Oleg Tyagnibok and Vitaly Klitschko that Batkivshchyna and Svoboda would form a government and bodies of the prosecutor's office and local government and Klitschko would be supported by the political parties in presidential elections.
According to Timoshenko's fellow party members, she has no full control over the party. Despite her status of the leader, Timoshenko is often kept aside from taking staff decisions. Regional organizations of Batkivshchyna are headed by people who are not obliged by anything to her and do not believe she may win. Her comrades who personally persuaded her not to run for the elections say she is "deaf to the language of arguments".

Predicting defeat of Timoshenko in the elections, her comrades who are in power parliament speaker Alexander Turchinov appointed by the Supreme Rada acting Ukrainian president and Rada-appointed prime minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, as observers say, count on parliament member and businessman Pyotr Poroshenko, candidate number one, according to ratings. The latest survey shows he may gain 25 percent of votes in the first round, while Timoshenko and Vitaly Klitschko may get less than ten percent. Political analysts explain Poroshenko's high ratings by the loss of confidence in the three former opposition leaders Yatsenyuk, Klitschko and Tyagnibok, who during the long period of protests on Independence Square failed to display leader qualities. In addition, sociologists say, Poroshenko wins formerly Yanukovich-supporting voters to his side in eastern Ukraine and is popular in the country's western part, where his rating is almost five times higher than that of Timoshenko. Experts forecast that Poroshenko has high chances to become the fifth president of Ukraine.