Ukraine’s opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, was poised for a commanding victory last night in a re-run of disputed presidential elections that have riven the country and revived old cold war rivalry between Moscow and the West.
Three exit polls gave Yushchenko and his orange-clad supporters a lead of at least 15% points over the government candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. With more than half of the ballots counted, he had 56,5% to 40% for his rival.
”This is the victory of the Ukrainian people,” said Yushchenko early on Monday as champagne flowed at his headquarters. ”It is a great victory day.”
He went on to tell thousands of jubilants in central Kiev: ”We have been independent for 14 years but we were not free. Now we can say this is a thing of the past. Now we are facing an independent and free Ukraine.”
The three exit polls gave Yushchenko between 56% and 58,1% of the votes and Yanukovich between 38,4% and 41.3%. Yanukovich stopped short of conceding defeat, but promised robust opposition if the vote went against him.
”There will be no talks,” he told reporters. ”If I lose, there will be a tough opposition. They will see what an opposition means.”
Earlier, Yushchenko thanked his supporters whose 16 days of demonstrations in the gathering Kiev winter forced the authorities to concede that a November run-off vote had been fraudulent and should be re-run, despite Yanukovich’s claims of victory.
The opposition victory, set to be confirmed by preliminary results tonight, ends an ugly election battle in which Yushchenko accused his rivals of trying to poison him, and Yanukovich hit back with accusations that his opponents were being funded by the US. But any hopes that a clear-cut result might reunite a deeply divided country were tempered by murmurs of discontent in Yanukovich’s strongholds in the east, where voters said they would not take defeat lying down.
Yanukovich’s camp also expressed dissatisfaction after the constitutional court ruled that the new voting process — agreed upon by both candidates — deprived some disabled voters of the vote.
The central elections committee, given 12 hours by the court to make changes, said it would try to provide more mobile voting stations. It is not clear how many voters were affected.
The court ruling will probably provoke legal challenges from the Yanukovich camp. Taras Chernopol, the head of the campaign, told local media that supporters had been left off voter lists, and said there had been open pro-opposition campaigning on television on Sunday. But a substantial victory could render such challenges futile.
A win for the pro-western Yushchenko will be quietly feted in Washington and European capitals, which did much to ensure that the edgy stand-off after the November 21 debacle ended in compromise, not conflict.
But the result will be a major foreign policy blow for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who strongly backed Yanukovich, even congratulating him on his victory before the outcome was final.
A liberal Russian MP, Boris Nemtsov, wearing an orange scarf to signify his support for Yushchenko, said: ”It does not matter who wins today, but that Ukraine is now a democratic country. The people have shown they are stronger than corruption and falsification.”
He said the impact of the crisis would be keenly felt in Russia.
”Putin is in a state of shock,” he said, adding that Ukraine’s experience belied Putin’s contention that Russia was not ready for true democracy. ”Ukraine has shown that a Slavic country can be a democracy. It is now the pioneer.”
The electoral re-run ap peared to pass off less contentiously than the original.
Election officials said they had not seen any serious violations, and a source close to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, part of 12 000 international monitors observing the vote, said they had received few reports of fraud.
”There are just titbits — dead people registered to vote and reports of buses of voters being moved around — but nothing that substantial,” the source said.
Some of the tension, in the capital at least, had dissipated. The central election commission, which during the previous two votes had been surrounded by barricades and guarded by 1 000 riot police with two water cannon trucks, was left unprotected, except for a dozen members of the youth activist group Pora milling around outside its gates.
The opposition claimed the electoral process had been much improved. Oleksandr Zinchenko, the head of the Yushchenko campaign, said: ”Compared to the first and second rounds it has proceeded in a more calm and honest manner.”
He added: ”Of course there were violations, but they did not change the character of the vote.”
He said problems were still possible, given that most falsification in the last round occurred after polls closed when vote counts were changed. ”The election does not end at 8pm, but when the results are announced.”
Polling station 48 in Kiev, which on the doomed November 21 run-off had been filled with observers for Yanukovich alleging voter violations, was quiet, and election officials said there had been few problems.
Vika Filomonova (23) who is unemployed, said she had voted for Yushchenko because of Yanukovich’s two criminal convictions, for theft and assault as a teenager.
”You can’t have a bandit in charge”, she said, ”and anyway, Yanukovich only helped his people in the east develop their economy. We didn’t see anything here.” – Guardian Unlimited Â