What the July 2019 Rada vote delivered

What did Ukrainian voters decide in the parliamentary election held on 21 July 2019, and what did it mean on 24 July 2019, three days after the count began to settle? The picture was already clear: the president's party had won a comfortable majority.

A vote brought forward

The election followed the dissolution of the Verkhovna Rada by President Volodymyr Zelensky in May. It had originally been scheduled for the end of October, and the dissolution, announced during his inauguration on 21 May 2019, brought it forward.

Five parties and 199 direct seats

As reported at the time, five parties cleared the threshold to enter the new Rada: Servant of the People, Opposition Platform – For Life, European Solidarity, the Batkivshchyna union and Holos. In addition, 199 deputies were elected in single-member constituencies under the majoritarian system.

Servant of the People, the president's party, took most of the seats. Its majority was comfortable. Later tallies put its total at 254 seats, an outright majority in the chamber.

What the result meant

The outcome tied the president's party directly to the new parliament. The president had dissolved the old chamber, and voters then gave his party most of the seats in its successor. Four other parties also took seats, so the new Rada was not a one-party chamber, but the largest force in it was the president's own.

The result also settled the question the early election had raised: whether voters would back the dissolution. Their ballots gave the president's party the numbers to govern without a coalition partner. That follows from the seat count, and the later figure of 254 seats confirmed it.

A note from the same weekend

Not all the news that weekend was political. On 20 July 2019, Olha Kharlan won gold in the sabre event at the World Fencing Championships, becoming a six-time world champion.