Ukraine: So Long, Oleksandr Moroz? · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

According to the preliminary results of Ukraine's Sept. 30 snap parliamentary election, five parties and blocs out of 20 will most likely get the minimum 3-percent share of the vote required to enter the new parliament: the Party of Regions, Yulia Tymoshenko's Bloc, Our Ukraine/People's Self-Defense Bloc, the Communist Party, and Volodymyr Lytvyn's Bloc.
It also appears that Oleksandr Moroz, leader of the Socialist Party, who was Victor Yushchenko's ally during the 2004 Orange Revolution, but joined Victor Yanukovych's coalition to become the speaker following the March 2006 vote, is not getting a sufficient number of votes this time.
It's still a bit too early to tell for sure, but a number of Ukrainian bloggers are already cheering the renegade Socialist leader's defeat. Yaroslava Naumova, editor of the Life section of the new Ukrainian-language weekly Novynar, wrote this (UKR) on her blog on Oct. 2:
Observing my friends and colleagues for the past two days, I've arrived at this conclusion: there is a lot more interest in the fate of the Socialists than in who will come in first or even in the future [coalition-building process]. We call one another, check the latest figures, regions where the vote is still not over, etc. That is, everyone's had enough of Grandfather Moroz. This has become a matter of principle, and everything, even the more important things, are pushed back. And so we have one more peculiarity of this election: “Moroz isn't gonna get through” (?!) :)
Here are the comments to this post:
reporterka:
To Yaroslava. I think it's not as much of an interest and concern for the fate of Grandfather Moroz, but rather cynicism: whether he'll get what he deserves.
Yaroslava Naumova:
Right, it's something of a way to check whether there is justice in this world :) and we are all busy now trying to get an answer to this rhetorical question :)
Anatoliy:
It seems to me that this will serve as a lesson to others (the leaders).
Borys Kushniruk, an economist who maintains a blog at Ukrayinska Pravda, a popular online publication co-founded by Georgiy Gongadze in 2000, wrote this (UKR) on Oct. 1:
[…] The Socialists’ failure to get into the parliament may become one of the most important results of this election. Betrayal of their voters and public lies that [abounded] at the time of their joining the Party of the Regions had to be punished. Such a result of the vote has to become yet another new tradition of the Ukrainian parliamentary system. Parties, and, even more so, their leaders, have to bear responsibility for their actions […] and [their voters] have to punish them by no-confidence vote.
Here is a handful of readers’ reactions:
zinik:
How are you going to survive without Moroz? Who's going to act as a [scapegoat]? The [president]?
PVN:
The author's so naive. Moroz is out – so what? Other fools have voted for Lytvyn, a faithful Kuchmist. […]
LH:
What's there to be happy about? It would've been better to have 3 percent of the Socialists in and [all] the Communists out. Just think of their constant screaming about NATO. Sick of them.