From the Times Online:

Ukraine faced the prospect of fresh political confrontation on the streets after the result of its fiercely contested presidential election teetered on a knife edge today.

According to exit polls published immediately after voting ended Yuliya Tymoshenko, the glamorous, firebrand leader of the Orange Revolution, was narrowly beaten by Viktor Yanukovych, her bitter rival. But the margin of defeat was as little as three percentage points, paving the way for a potential challenge in the courts — and in the streets if her campaign claims widespread electoral fraud.

Two polls gave her 45.5 per cent against 48.7 per cent for Mr Yanukovych, while two others put him between four and five percentage points ahead. While all four polls gave the election to Mr Yanukovych the result was tighter than either side had predicted.

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Update: President Victor Yushchenko signs new election law (Kyiv Post)

From Reuters:

Yanukovich’s Regions Party earlier pushed through parliament an amendment to electoral rules that will scrap the requirement for a quorum of representatives of both contenders to approve the count at individual polling stations.

“Parliament has passed changes to the law … which wreck an honest presidential election, make it false, dishonest, unregulated,” Tymoshenko, the prime minister, said in a televised statement.

“This has been done because Yanukovich does not believe in his victory and he wants to get a result only through falsification,” she said.

She urged President Viktor Yushchenko not to sign the electoral rule changes into law and said she had invited ambassadors from the Group of Eight countries to an urgent meeting later on Wednesday.

“I think that the president, who has spoken much about honest elections, is simply obliged to publicly refuse to sign the law,” Tymoshenko later told a television chat show.

“His signature will be a death sentence on honest elections in Ukraine and, as a result, to democracy in Ukraine.”

Tymoshenko and Yanukovich are set for a runoff vote for president on Sunday after a bitter campaign in which she has openly insulted him and he has accused her of systematic lying.

Both have traded accusations of attempts at rigging the election, but international poll monitors said a first round of voting last month was “clean” and instead criticized politicians’ “unsubstantiated” charges of large scale fraud.

…

“Tymoshenko at the moment is in a difficult psychological state and again she is trying to find a way of falsifying the election…” Yanukovich told a local television station while on the campaign trail in the eastern city of Luhansk.

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Why we have a quorom:

A quorum is the minimum number of members of a deliberative body necessary to conduct the business of that group.^[1] Ordinarily, this is a majority of the people expected to be there, although bodies may have a lower or higher quorum. When quorum is not met, a legislative body cannot hold a vote, and cannot change the status quo.

From the Toronto Star:

Whichever candidate wins, it will be a victory for Russia, which took a beating as the villain of the Orange Revolution.

“The 2004 election was ideological,” said Ukraine expert Jakob Hedenskog, a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. “It was an important choice between East and West. This time it’s about bread-and-butter issues.”

Under Yushchenko, Ukraine veered toward the West, with failed attempts to join the European Union and NATO, and a “national project” to promote the Ukrainian language and church, and gain recognition for the 1930s famine that killed millions of Ukrainians under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s brutal economic policies.

But antagonizing Moscow came at a price. Russia cut off gas deliveries to Ukraine over a payment dispute, causing a drop in pressure in the Europe-bound pipeline and gas shortages in European countries.

Moscow’s fierce opposition to Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership also helped to curb the West’s enthusiasm for Kyiv’s entry.

This time, the crisis on the home front is more pressing. The International Monetary Fund has frozen an emergency bailout because government infighting undermined required budget cuts.

Unemployment is biting, and a new European visa regime has destroyed the livelihoods of cross-border traders in impoverished western Ukraine.

Meanwhile, corruption, broken government promises and an oligarch-dominated economy have disillusioned many of Ukraine’s 46 million people, and low turnouts are predicted at the polls.

Still, says Dyczok, life has improved in many ways since 2004, when she observed the elections.

“Society has moved forward in ways people don’t notice,” she said. “They are more engaged. They’re active, and they protest at the local level. The political spectrum is diverse, and there will be a strong opposition.”

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