Ukraine votes in tense presidential showdown

KIEV: Ukrainians on Sunday were choosing between two sworn rivals in a tight presidential election run-off after a bruising campaign that sparked

warnings of a repeat of the 2004 Orange Revolution protests.

The dour pro-Russia opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich has the edge on his more charismatic challenger, the pragmatic Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, after winning January’s first-round poll by a 10 percent margin.

But the identity of the fourth post-Soviet president in this strategic country situated between the European Union and Russia remains uncertain as opinion polls have been banned since the first round.

Tymoshenko will be hoping to capitalise on her opponent’s clumsy verbal gaffes in the campaign while the Yanukovich camp has sought to paint the prime minister as an over-excitable opportunist.

Amid a charged atmosphere, both have exchanged accusations of seeking to rig the vote and analysts warn the losing side is likely to take grievances to the courts or even the streets if the margin of victory is narrow.

In 2004, tens of thousands of people protested against election results that had initially handed victory to Yanukovich, unleashing the Orange Revolution that swept pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko to power.

“A new revolution is highly unlikely but we have to await confrontations in the court, in parliament and in the street,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta centre for political studies in Kiev.

In a sign of preparations for protests, dozens of blue tents surrounded by Yanukovich supporters appeared outside the buildings of the Central Elections Commission and the presidency, AFP correspondents witnessed.

Tymoshenko’s party meanwhile accused the Yanukovich camp of sending three of its MPs into the Central Elections Commission building to spend the night with the aim of putting “psychological pressure” on officials.

Polls were to close at 1800 GMT, when a clutch of exit polls are expected to give an immediate indication of the voting trend.

“I have always voted for Yanukovich. The Orange team were in power but did nothing,” said Yuri, 30, a businessman, as he cast his vote amid sub-zero temperatures but bright sunshine in Kiev.

But Elena Poliakova, 60 slammed him as a puppet of Ukraine’s powerful oligarchs. “He cannot speak, he only knows how to read out what is written down for him.”

Tymoshenko will be hoping her telegenic style will win over hesitant voters after branding Yanukovich a “coward” for failing to show up at a televised debate that left the prime minister debating against an empty lectern.

The last days of Yanukovich’s campaign were also marked by some colourful gaffes which saw him insist the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov was Ukrainian and confuse the words “gene pool” with “genocide”.

“I voted for a new Ukraine, a beautiful, European Ukraine where people will live happily,” Tymoshenko said after casting her vote in her home city of Dnipropetrovsk.

President Yushchenko was bundled out in the first round in a humiliating fifth-place finish, paying the price for the failure of the Orange Revolution to realise the country’s dreams of stability and prosperity.

The new president will oversee the 2012 European football championships that Ukraine is to jointly host with Poland, an ambitious plan so far plagued by difficulties.

Yanukovich has made a remarkable comeback since the debacle of 2004, trying to shake off his image as a Kremlin stooge with the help of US political consultants.

He has attacked the government’s economic record after Ukraine was hit worse by the global economic crisis than any other major European economy, its GDP shrinking 15 percent in 2009.

Tymoshenko played a key role in the Orange Revolution and is seen as a champion of Ukraine’s bid for EU integration. But recently she has become close with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Yanukovich’s critics fault him for never explaining the vote-rigging that courts said his camp committed in 2004 and point to two convictions for theft and assault in Soviet times that were erased in the 1970s.

Tymoshenko was briefly held in prison on forgery and gas smuggling charges in 2001, while her businessman husband Olexander was implicated in the same scandal and spent one year in jail and then two more years in hiding.