Early polls give Ukrainians hope of political change

Ukranians looked to have backed the former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko in yesterday's parliamentary elections, according to an exit poll.

The poll of 18,000 voters put Mr Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party first with 25 per cent, ahead of the Communist Party, which looked set to pick up some 21 per cent of the vote.

President Leonid Kuchma's party, For United Ukraine, seemed likely to come in a poor third with just 11 per cent in an election widely seen as a referendum on his record. Mr Kuchma has been accused of corruption and conniving in the intimidation and murder of critics.

Voters in a country the size of France with a population of 49 million were generally apathetic or cynical about the outcome of the election, which has been marred in its final stages by the shooting dead of one of the candidates as he entered his apartment. "I'm not going to vote," Ihor said yesterday as he sat in the spring sunshine on a bench in a park in central Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. "Why should I? They are all criminals."

After casting his vote, Mr Kuchma said he expected parties supporting him to win, adding: "I hope that common sense will prevail. Ukraine's future hangs on this election – a choice between development and stagnation."

Mr Kuchma is under attack from both right and left. Mr Yushchenko's party, which looked set to win the most seats in the 450-member Rada, as parliament is called, is supported by the West and has promised market reforms. The Communists, strong in the ethnically Russian eastern Ukraine, appeared to have done well but are not likely to ally themselves with Mr Kuchma's pro-market opponents. This makes it difficult to get rid of the President, who faces election himself in two and a half years.

Ukraine won independence in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet Union, but until recently has been sunk in economic depression, which has led to distrust of all politicians and parties as being the instruments of local oligarchs. The country has also been at the centre of a mini-cold war between Russia and the US as each tries to become the predominant foreign influence.

Some 1,000 foreign election observers, led by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), were on duty yesterday around polling booths bedecked with blue and yellow Ukrainian flags.But the government control of much of the media has ensured that pro-Kuchma candidates get far more coverage than their opponents. The administration also has total control of the judicial apparatus.

Mr Kuchma has survived a scandal following the discovery 18 months ago of the headless body of Georgy Gongadze, a journalist critical of the government,in a shallow grave north of Kiev.

Soon afterwards, a security officer from Mr Kuchma's palace guard fled the country with tapes of presidential conversations. The President does not order the murder of Mr Gongadze but he is repeatedly heard discussing how convenient it would be if he were kidnapped or silenced. Despite riots in Kiev, Mr Kuchma stayed in power largely because of the power of the executive, which inherited its authority from the Soviet system.

¿ More than 50,000 Moldovans rallied to demand that the ruling Communists resign and call an early election in the former Soviet state yesterday amid rising tension over the disappearance of a leading opposition deputy.