The number of candidates who are running for mayor of Kyiv is growing before our very eyes — there are now over 150 aspirants. On April 10 the two favorites of sociological surveys, Leonid Chernovetsky and Vitalii Klitschko, were joined by another serious candidate, Oleksandr Turchynov. At a joint party conference held in the Ukrainian Home BYut leader Yulia Tymoshenko spent nearly 10 minutes listing Turchynov’s merits. He is a “man of the highest integrity,” a professional economist, and an excellent administrator with perfect organizational skills. In a word, BYuT “is offering Kyiv the best that it has.”
Evidently, Turchynov’s low popularity rating does not worry Tymoshenko one bit. First, she does not trust sociologists, who, she claims, lower BYuT’s ratings before every election. Second, she does not believe that Kyivites will make the same mistake twice by electing Chernovetsky.
“Today many people are saying that he has good chances. If candidates like him have chances in Kyiv, which is Ukraine’s capital and intellectual and spiritual center, then the entire country does not stand a chance. I don’t know how much buckwheat he delivered, how much money he distributed, and how many meals he prepared. But I know for a fact that one cannot be so deaf, blind, and absolutely foolhardy as to fail to grasp how much money was stolen from Kyiv. If kilograms of buckwheat can blind people, then Chernovetsky has no rival. But I believe that Kyivites’ views are absolutely different.”
It is nice to hope for the better.
The top five candidates on BYut’s list for the Kyiv City Council are Yulia Tymoshenko, Oleksandr Turchynov, Mykola Tomenko, Oleksandr Zinchenko, and Anatolii Khostikoiev. Tymoshenko explained Zinchenko’s presence by the fact that he is “a professional, patriotic, and honest” individual.
One BYut candidate who is likely to be elected is political scientist Oleh Medvediev. Remarkably, he was not aware of this. When The Day’s reporter congratulated Medvediev, he replied: “I don’t know. In Russia a Medvedev also won.”
In other words, the idea to nominate one democratic candidate for mayor of Kyiv was laid to rest on April 10. To all appearances, this is very displeasing to Viktor Baloha, the head of the Presidential Secretariat, who accused Tymoshenko of egotism, destroying the coalition, and her “obvious cooperation with the opposition Party of Regions.”
In response, Tymoshenko promised to continue “suffering” for the sake of the coalition: “The democratic coalition in the Verkhovna Rada is a result that our entire team achieved through much suffering. I treasure the unity of the democratic coalition and will not permit individual functionaries and random people to destroy this unity.”
