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Nation    

Election bill gets overwhelming approval
Journal Staff Report

KIEV, Nov. 17 – Fears of a possible election boycott next year eased on Thursday after Parliament overwhelmingly voted to approve an election bill incorporating most of the amendments submitted by opposition groups.

Some 366 lawmakers - including 98 from opposition parties - in the 450-seat Parliament voted for the bill that will regulate the upcoming general election due in October 2012.

The approval of the bill has been watched by the European Union as an indicator of whether the pro-government party can work with opposition groups on crucial issues, such as election law.

“This is a victory by opposition groups,” Arseniy Yatseniuk, the leader of the second most popular opposition party, the Front of Changes, said in a statement. “According to this bill, the opposition will win the parliamentary election of 2012.”

Yatseniuk, currently the only politician capable of defeating President Viktor Yanukovych at presidential election, has last month threatened to boycott the election unless the bill includes amendments from opposition groups.

Although losing on some other issues, the opposition groups managed to push through the amendments that make it more difficult for pro-government parties to dominate election commissions that will eventually count ballots. This is supposed to reduce possible election fraud.

Serhiy Mishchenko, a lawmaker from Batkivshchyna, the most popular opposition party led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said the bill was a “forced compromise.”

“We voted for the best of what we had been offered,” Mishchenko said. “The choices were either falsification of vote or maximum transparent election system.”

The bill calls for electing a half of the 450-seat Parliament on party lists and another half in individual constituencies. Ukraine’s all current lawmakers were elected on party lists.

Other changes allow only political parties to nominate candidates, banning political blocs from the vote. The clause may pose some problems for Tymoshenko’s group, which has been so far known as the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, but will now have to run as Batkivshchyna party.

Also, the bill increases the threshold that is required for entering Parliament on party lists to 5% from 3% currently. This clause may hurt smaller political parties whose rating has been hovering at between 3% and 6%.

Vitaliy Klichko’s Udar, an opposition party whose rating has been growing over the past 12 months to about 5% currently, said the bill was not a compromise, but rather “collusion” between big parties, including big opposition parties.

“Now, the government will have a chance to say that this bill was a compromise, while it more looks like collusion,” Udar said in a statement. (tl/ez)




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