The 2012 Parliamentary Election in Ukraine: The Democratic Rollback

Abstract

This paper reviews Ukraine’s 2012 parliamentary election. Despite political repressions and significant disadvantages in access to media, the opposition parties won a majority of the proportional representation seats. However, the Party of Regions maintained its parliamentary majority by winning more than half of the single-member districts and luring independent candidates into the ruling coalition. Two new parties that cleared the electoral threshold – UDAR and Svoboda – joined Batkivschyna in their opposition against the incumbent government. The post-election developments indicate that the parliamentary majority established by the Party of Regions is quite unstable and the presence of radical right and radical left parties will make the new parliament highly confrontational.