Local elections were held in Ukraine on Sunday 31 October 2010. Elections were held for local councils and also for mayors.

The results are slow to come out and an overall picture is difficult to grasp. There has been a report about irregularities, but most of the rhetoric in that regard seems to be partisan. One strange aspect is that the each local electoral commission is responsible for announcing the results of its own contest. The Central Electoral Commission does not have this role. There are 15,000 local contests. So, the opportunity for fraud at the local level could perhaps be great.

As far as I can tell, the most interesting development seems to be the decline of Yulia Tymoshenko’s party in some parts of the west of Ukraine and the rise of the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda party, which is a nationalist party. Ukrainian Journal reports that Svoboda won 34.2% in elections to the Lviv city council, 32% to the Ternopil city council and 31.3% to the Ivano-Frankivsk city council. In the east, the Regions party dominated, as expected. Kyiv Post reports that the Regions party has issued a statement about its own performance, claiming that it has won the mayorship in 118 of 177 towns of ‘regional importance’.