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UKRAINE’S Communist Party (CPU) general secretary Petro Symonenko warned at the weekend that elections being held in the country yesterday were “neither democratic nor legitimate.”
In a meeting with MEPs on Saturday, Mr Symonenko slammed the “criminal policy of the new Ukrainian government” since the elected Viktor Yanukovych administration was forcibly overthrown by the “Euromaidan” protest movement, which included the fascist Svoboda and Right Sector parties.
Ukraine’s right-wing parties are gleefully predicting that the Communists, who received 13 per cent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections, will this time fail to get the 5 per cent minimum required to enter parliament.
Recent polls put them on between 4 and 5 per cent in the areas which voted yesterday, but Mr Symonenko noted that the far-right takeover in Kiev had prompted the loss of Crimea to Russia while an ongoing war against anti-fascist resistance forces in the east of the country would mean no meaningful elections would take place there.
Both Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which is home to more industrial workers than the west, are traditional strongholds of the Communists, meaning the inability of their supporters in those areas to vote yesterday was predicted to hit the party hard.
Mr Symonenko also attacked “blackmail, violence, kidnapping and torture” directed by fascist “hooligans” at Communist Party members.
CPU members have had their stalls overthrown, leaflets and election materials seized and burned and their door-to-door election workers have been “repeatedly attacked with direct participation by so-called law enforcement officers.”
Though the party was hostile to the corrupt Yanukovych presidency and had long called for a federal Ukraine, the new regime has prioritised persecuting communists, dissolving their parliamentary bloc and making moves to outlaw them outright.
Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko confirmed last week the government would continue its effort in the courts to have the CPU banned whether it wins seats in parliament or not.
“This is understandable because the Communist Party is the only ideological and political opposition to the ruling regime,” Mr Symonenko said.
