31 мая 2007 Года
May 31, 2007. EARLY ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE
 Mikhail Chechetov: “A coalition with Yushenko? We’re not opposed to it.”
With parliamentary elections scheduled for September 30, politicians in Ukraine are already beginning to divvy up seats in the new legislature by agreeing on possible coalitions. According to the latest polls, the largest number of seats will go to Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions. His party’s majority, however, will not be large enough to avoid the need for a coalition.
Rumors are circulating that some of Yanukovich’s former allies are considering switching allegiance to the Our Ukraine party of President Viktor Yushenko (Yanukovich’s main political rival).
In a recent interview with the newspaper Izvestia, Mikhail Chechetov, a key figure in Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, stated that the scheduling of early elections in the first place was a big concession of his party. “We made a compromise with our political opponents, who didn’t have the strength to wait for the next election cycle,” he added. “But we only agreed to these elections on certain conditions that would guarantee their fairness. Most important to us was the creation of new rosters of eligible voters. In the last elections, which took place in March of 2006, up to 15% of our supporters in Eastern Ukraine were denied the chance to vote because their names were incorrectly translated from Russian into Ukrainian. At the same time, residents of Western Ukraine were allowed to vote for relatives who lived abroad and were not even present at the elections by simply presenting their passports. And this was not limited to individual cases – we’re talking about 5 million passports! After the new roster is established, these problems will be avoided,” asserted Chechetov.
Chechetov also predicted his party’s victory in the September elections, adding that it would become the core of a broad coalition that would extend its arm even to President Yushenko’s Our Ukraine party. “For us the fate of the Russian language in Ukraine is of central importance,” added Chechetov. “It should be given the status of Ukraine’s second official language. Many of Kiev’s residents spoke exclusively Ukrainian in the early 1990’s, and now they’re returning to Russian. This is a natural process that should be provided with a legal basis.”
Translated by Artem V. Zagorodnov
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