30.10.2010
EPP Coordinator on Foreign Affairs, MEP Elmar Brok, announced on Friday in Brussels:
„The European People’s Party is deeply concerned with the continuing deterioration of the domestic situation in Ukraine, particularly in light of the local elections scheduled for Sunday October 31st. Despite our strong and clear messages to President Yanukovych and Ukraine’s government, anti-democratic actions continue and have already become systematic. State authorities failed to remedy the seriously flawed legal framework and implement urgent measures needed to ensure transparency and build voter confidence.
As a result, the whole electoral process is marked with a critical mass of facts of harassment of civic activists, intimidation of candidates from opposition, pressure on media, growing abuse of power and other manipulations. The most obvious and outrageous examples include unbalanced composition of election commissions with clear domination of the ruling party, creation and support of bogus party structures and refusal to register legitimate branches of the Batkivshchyna party in a number of regions, most notably in Kyiv and Lviv. These unacceptable developments make practically irrelevant the voting day, as both – the questionable legal basis and the fraudulent electoral process – made impossible to conduct free and fair elections that correspond to the European standards.
Unfortunately new Ukrainian authorities failed a democracy test.“