The new Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the Ukraine, elected on Sunday, will have an overwhelming national mandate to negotiate peace terms to end the five-year civil war.
Sluha Narodu ("Servant of the People"), the party of President Volodymyr Zelensky, having won more than 43% of the votes countrywide,
will now command majorities of both the party-list and the single-constituency seats in the new parliament; 253 seats altogether out of 422, or a "mono-coalition" as the party is calling the result, or as the hostile Ukrainian media
term it, "
a landslide [which] has never occurred in the contemporary history of Ukraine and it is more typical for post-Soviet Asian dictatorships."
This beats earlier pollster predictions that Zelensky would be forced into a coalition with Holos ("The Voice"), a US-invented spoiler organization of Lvov region (Galicia) led by pop singer, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk.
He ended up with less than 6% of the national votes, fewer than forecast. Holos has proved to be neither the voice of youth, nor an organization without oligarch support (it was backed by Victor Pinchuk), nor a political party at all.
Polling better than predicted was the Donbass (Donetsk, Lugansk regions) party, Opposition Platform led by Victor Medvedchuk, which ended up with 13% nationally; 48% in Lugansk; 42% in Donetsk; 24% in Odessa; and 19% in Nikolaev. If the additional votes of the eastern Opposition Bloc of Boris Kolesnikov and Vadim Novinsky are counted with Medvedchuk's aggregate, together they have drawn majorities of 53% to 54%, putting Zelensky's party in the east in a minority.
This is the first time democracy has defeated a US Government-installed putsch and junta in Europe since the election of Andreas Papandreou's Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in 1982.
Comment: Reuters is there to stir the pot, reporting :