Yushchenko continues to lead in latest poll of Ukraine's voters (06/27/04)

Yushchenko continues to lead in latest poll of Ukraine's voters

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - National Deputy Viktor Yushchenko, leader of the Our Ukraine political bloc, continued to hold a comfortable 8.6 percent lead over Ukraine's Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in a nationwide poll of front-runners in the presidential elections. But with Mr. Yanukovych's candidacy continuing on the ascendancy and his own numbers flat for more than a year, Mr. Yushchenko decided on June 14 to shake things up at the top of his campaign organization.

In a political survey completed on June 4 - a month before the presidential election process officially begins with the registration of candidates on July 3 and two months before actual campaigning begins on August 1 - 26.6 percent of the individuals surveyed registered their support for Mr. Yushchenko, while 18 percent expressed a preference for Mr. Yanukovych.

Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko, a perennial presidential candidate, was third, but his numbers have dropped to 9.3 percent from previous figures in the mid and high teens.

The poll, published on June 18, asked 1,200 respondents from all regions of Ukraine to choose from a list of 10 candidates. It was conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Fund in conjunction with the Socis Center polling firm, and had a margin of error of 3 percent.

The survey also found that nearly 40 percent of respondents who were asked for whom they would vote in a runoff between the two front-runners, named Mr. Yushchenko, while 31 percent identified Mr. Yanukovych as their choice.

While Mr. Yushchenko's lead may look comfortable for the moment, future trouble could lurk for Mr. Yushchenko in the fact that, while his ratings have remained flat at best as the pre-election build-up in Ukraine continues, Mr. Yanukovych's popularity has doubled over the last year.

And while the leader of Our Ukraine, the largest parliamentary faction in the Verkhovna Rada, could have decided to take solace in the fact that a larger percentage of his supporters were more staunchly committed to his candidacy than the percentage of those in the Yanukovych camp (52 percent versus 44 percent), Mr. Yushchenko did not seem in the mood to be comforted by statistics when on June 14 he recruited National Deputy Oleksander Zinchenko, the second vice-chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, to be his campaign manager.

Mr. Zinchenko, a longtime stalwart of the pro-presidential forces in the Parliament was ousted from the Social Democratic Party - United nearly a year ago, after he criticized his partner and the party's leading figure, Viktor Medvedchuk, for attempting to stifle press freedoms in his ownership of much of Ukraine's mass media. Mr. Zinchenko was forced out of the party, while officially resigning, even though he had until recently been the No. 2 man in the organization and, the leader of its parliamentary faction, and was its representative in the parliamentary leadership as the second vice-chairman of the Verkhovna Rada.

While the SDPU barely made the 4 percent cut to achieve representation in the Parliament in the March 2002 elections, Mr. Zinchenko was awarded a leadership post after he masterminded the manner in which the pro-presidential forces organized minority factions to form a majority coalition, effectively neutralizing a resounding electoral victory by Our Ukraine.

Mr. Zinchenko, who also had been honorary president of the Inter television network, which he founded in 1996, but is now controlled by Mr. Medvedchuk, is widely recognized as a brilliant political organizer and is also credited with developing the infrastructure of the SDPU, turning it into the largest political organization in the country.

Mr. Zinchenko, who was never personally involved in the feud between Our Ukraine and the SDPU and its two leaders - which has underpinned many of the political developments in Ukraine's Parliament over the past two years - unexpectedly became an Our Ukraine confidante, and ultimately a member, when a parliamentary commission he was appointed to head to investigate the controversial mayoral elections in the Zakarpattia Oblast city of Mukachiv in May, resoundingly criticized the role of the SDPU in the fiasco and called for new elections.

Nonetheless, a Dzerkalo Tyzhnia report stated that the appointment of Mr. Zinchenko was opposed by the staunch national democratic element of the Our Ukraine bloc, internal criticism that Mr. Yushchenko decided to ignore as he searched for a way to re-ignite his presidential campaign.

Mr. Yushchenko's current campaign manager, Roman Bezsmertnyi, was not dismissed from his post, but merely reassigned as the director of the campaign team, reported Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. Mr. Bezsmertnyi, like Mr. Zinchenko, was a member of the pro-presidential parliamentary majority before joining forces with Mr. Yushchenko.

Meanwhile, on June 22 Mr. Yushchenko said that he was close to achieving the goal of obtaining an agreement among the three oppositionist political organizations in the Verkhovna Rada - Our Ukraine, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and the Socialist Party - to field a single candidate in the October 31 election. He said negotiations between the Tymoshenko Bloc and Our Ukraine are proceeding smoothly.

"We have a good dialogue and are close to an agreement," noted Mr. Yushchenko, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

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