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Yushchenko won by more than two million votes
AP
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Final preliminary results showed Opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko had won Ukraine’s drawn-out and divisive presidential election, while pressure built yesterday on his opponent, Kremlin favourite Viktor Yanukovych, to concede and abandon his vow to challenge the rerun election.
Yushchenko won 51.99 per cent to Yanukovych’s 44.19 per cent in Sunday’s court-ordered rerun of the vote, according to a final preliminary vote tally - a difference of about 2.3 million votes.
“In principle, we have the result,” said Yaroslav Davydovych, the head of the Central Election Commission. “I don’t know who can doubt it.”
Yanukovych, who returned to work yesterday as prime minister, has refused to concede defeat and said he will challenge the results in Ukraine’s Supreme Court. He said his campaign team had nearly 5,000 complaints about how the voting was conducted and claimed that 4.8 million people - more than double the margin of Yushchenko’s victory - had been unable to cast ballots, among them disabled and elderly voters.
Ukraine’s Parliament approved restrictions on voting at home in a bid to prevent fraud, but the Constitutional Court threw out the restrictions on the eve of the vote. Many people, however, were unaware of the ruling, Yanukovych’s campaign said.
Yanukovych’s vow to challenge the results echoes Yushchenko’s successful move following the fraud-tainted November 21 runoff, which the court annulled, leading to Sunday’s revote. But that ruling came amid widespread complaints from foreign monitors that the November 21 vote was unfair; this time, monitors have said they didn’t see mass violations.
Yanukovych’s team has yet to file an appeal, and the Central Election Commission’s Davydovych said that many of the complaints they had received, purportedly from individual voters, were “printed on the same computer, with the same text, the same envelopes”.
“This is on the conscience of those who do that,” Davydovych said.
President Leonid Kuchma, in the runup to Sunday’s vote, urged both candidates to accept the official result and not appeal. And the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights watchdog, also called on Yanukovych yesterday to accept defeat.
“I call on all parties to accept the verdict of the ballot box and to refrain from rhetoric which may fuel division in Ukraine,” said Terry Davis, the council’s secretary-general.
Ukraine’s east-west divide has deepened during the bitter and protracted election campaign. The Russian-speaking, heavily industrialised east backed Yanukovych, while cosmopolitan Kiev and the nationalistic west supported Yushchenko.
The bitterly fought campaign also frayed ties between the west and Russia. The Kremlin is nervous about the eastward expanding EU and NATO, and Russian President Vladimir Putin personally campaigned for Yanukovych in the first two rounds of voting in November. He also had congratulated Yanukovych after the fraud-marred second round, ignoring western complaints that the vote was rigged.
Yushchenko, who draws much of his support from nationalist western Ukraine where anti-Russian feeling is high, has aimed to bring this sprawling nation of 48 million closer to the West, without alienating giant neighbour Russia.
Yushchenko said his first mission in office would be a trip to Moscow to try and fix “deformed” ties between the two nations.
“I must show Russia that our earlier ties were deformed, they were formed by Ukrainian (business) clans,” Yushchenko was quoted as saying in an interview published yesterday in Russia’s Izvestia newspaper.
“We can and must turn this page if we are friends and are prepared to look one another in the eye.”
Yushchenko said both countries needed a better working relationship.
“Russia is Ukraine’s neighbour. It is better to argue twice with your wife than once with your neighbour,” Yushchenko told Izvestia, adding that the two nations share Slavic roots, family links, culture and language.
Petro Poroshenko, a key Yushchenko ally, said that Yushchenko’s main domestic task will be fighting the corruption that pervades Ukrainian business and society, improving the economy and reconfiguring the tax system to bring an end to Ukraine’s underground economy.
The goal, he said, is for “every citizen of Ukraine to feel that his life is better”.
“In two to three months, each of you must see the difference between new power and the old one,” Poroshenko said.
jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20041228T210000-0500_72221_OBS_YUSHCHENKO_WON_BY_MORE_THAN_TWO_MILLION_VOTES.asp
AP
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Final preliminary results showed Opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko had won Ukraine’s drawn-out and divisive presidential election, while pressure built yesterday on his opponent, Kremlin favourite Viktor Yanukovych, to concede and abandon his vow to challenge the rerun election.
Yushchenko won 51.99 per cent to Yanukovych’s 44.19 per cent in Sunday’s court-ordered rerun of the vote, according to a final preliminary vote tally - a difference of about 2.3 million votes.
“In principle, we have the result,” said Yaroslav Davydovych, the head of the Central Election Commission. “I don’t know who can doubt it.”
Yanukovych, who returned to work yesterday as prime minister, has refused to concede defeat and said he will challenge the results in Ukraine’s Supreme Court. He said his campaign team had nearly 5,000 complaints about how the voting was conducted and claimed that 4.8 million people - more than double the margin of Yushchenko’s victory - had been unable to cast ballots, among them disabled and elderly voters.
Ukraine’s Parliament approved restrictions on voting at home in a bid to prevent fraud, but the Constitutional Court threw out the restrictions on the eve of the vote. Many people, however, were unaware of the ruling, Yanukovych’s campaign said.
Yanukovych’s vow to challenge the results echoes Yushchenko’s successful move following the fraud-tainted November 21 runoff, which the court annulled, leading to Sunday’s revote. But that ruling came amid widespread complaints from foreign monitors that the November 21 vote was unfair; this time, monitors have said they didn’t see mass violations.
Yanukovych’s team has yet to file an appeal, and the Central Election Commission’s Davydovych said that many of the complaints they had received, purportedly from individual voters, were “printed on the same computer, with the same text, the same envelopes”.
“This is on the conscience of those who do that,” Davydovych said.
President Leonid Kuchma, in the runup to Sunday’s vote, urged both candidates to accept the official result and not appeal. And the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights watchdog, also called on Yanukovych yesterday to accept defeat.
“I call on all parties to accept the verdict of the ballot box and to refrain from rhetoric which may fuel division in Ukraine,” said Terry Davis, the council’s secretary-general.
Ukraine’s east-west divide has deepened during the bitter and protracted election campaign. The Russian-speaking, heavily industrialised east backed Yanukovych, while cosmopolitan Kiev and the nationalistic west supported Yushchenko.
The bitterly fought campaign also frayed ties between the west and Russia. The Kremlin is nervous about the eastward expanding EU and NATO, and Russian President Vladimir Putin personally campaigned for Yanukovych in the first two rounds of voting in November. He also had congratulated Yanukovych after the fraud-marred second round, ignoring western complaints that the vote was rigged.
Yushchenko, who draws much of his support from nationalist western Ukraine where anti-Russian feeling is high, has aimed to bring this sprawling nation of 48 million closer to the West, without alienating giant neighbour Russia.
Yushchenko said his first mission in office would be a trip to Moscow to try and fix “deformed” ties between the two nations.
“I must show Russia that our earlier ties were deformed, they were formed by Ukrainian (business) clans,” Yushchenko was quoted as saying in an interview published yesterday in Russia’s Izvestia newspaper.
“We can and must turn this page if we are friends and are prepared to look one another in the eye.”
Yushchenko said both countries needed a better working relationship.
“Russia is Ukraine’s neighbour. It is better to argue twice with your wife than once with your neighbour,” Yushchenko told Izvestia, adding that the two nations share Slavic roots, family links, culture and language.
Petro Poroshenko, a key Yushchenko ally, said that Yushchenko’s main domestic task will be fighting the corruption that pervades Ukrainian business and society, improving the economy and reconfiguring the tax system to bring an end to Ukraine’s underground economy.
The goal, he said, is for “every citizen of Ukraine to feel that his life is better”.
“In two to three months, each of you must see the difference between new power and the old one,” Poroshenko said.
jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20041228T210000-0500_72221_OBS_YUSHCHENKO_WON_BY_MORE_THAN_TWO_MILLION_VOTES.asp