Ukraine PM’s party takes lead in parliamentary race

PanARMENIAN.Net - Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's People's Front party has taken the lead in Ukraine's parliamentary elections gaining 21.7 percent of the votes with 15.12 percent of the ballots counted, the Central Election Commission (CEC) said Monday, according to RIA Novosti.

The CEC said Petro Poroshenko's Bloc is now close second with 21.69 percent of the votes.

The two leading parties are followed by the Samopomich (Self-Help) party headed by mayor of Lviv Andriy Sadovy now gaining 10.11 percent of the votes, the Opposition Bloc with 9.29 percent, Oleh Lyashko's nationalist Radical Party with 7.9 percent of the votes and Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party headed by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 6.1 percent.

Ukrainians went to the polls Sunday to vote in 423 members of parliament — 225 of them from party lists and 198 in single-candidate constituencies. The electoral threshold has been set at five percent.

According to the Ukrainian Civil Network Opora, the turnout in the elections to the Verkhovna Rada throughout Ukraine was 51.2 percent with the highest results of 59.7 percent in the West of the country, including the cities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, and the lowest turnout of 41.1 percent in the eastern Ukraine.