Over a third of Ukrainians open to elections before war fully ends – survey
A total of 38% of Ukrainians support elections being held before the war fully ends: 15% believe voting should take place even before hostilities cease, while 23% say it should be held after a ceasefire and security guarantees are in place, but before a final peace agreement is signed.
Source: a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted on 20 July – 3 August
Details: KIIS asked respondents whether national elections should be held if a ceasefire is in place and Ukraine has received reliable security guarantees, including additional weapons and the deployment of European peacekeepers.
According to the survey, 15% of Ukrainians believe elections should be held right now, even before a ceasefire. In March, 12% of respondents held this view.
A further 23% of respondents support elections being held after a ceasefire and once Ukraine has received security guarantees.
Compared with March, support for this scenario rose by 10 percentage points, from 13% to 23%.
Meanwhile, 57% believe elections should only be held after a final peace agreement is signed and the war has fully ended, down from 69% in March.
A further 6% of respondents were undecided.
The survey also found that 44% believe presidential elections should be held first once voting becomes possible. Meanwhile, 32% favour parliamentary elections being held first, while 11% prefer local elections.
"Although the number of people who support elections being held in the near future, or at least after a ceasefire, has risen slightly, most Ukrainians still believe elections should not be held yet," said KIIS Executive Director Anton Hrushetskyi.
For reference: The KIIS survey was conducted between 20 July and 3 August using telephone interviews across all government-controlled regions of Ukraine. A total of 974 respondents took part. The survey covered Ukrainian citizens aged 18 and over who were residing in government-controlled areas of the country at the time of the poll. It did not include residents of territories temporarily occupied by Russia, although some respondents were internally displaced people who had relocated from those areas. Ukrainians who left the country after 24 February 2022 were also excluded from the survey.
Formally, under normal circumstances, the margin of error of such a sample (with a probability of 0.95 and taking into account the design effect of 1.3) did not exceed 4.1% for indicators close to 50%, 3.5% for indicators close to 25%, 2.5% for indicators close to 10%, 1.8% for indicators close to 5%.
Under conditions of war, in addition to the specified formal error, a certain systematic deviation is added.
Background: A survey conducted by the Rating polling organisation on 20-21 July showed that in the first round of a hypothetical presidential election, 22.3% of Ukrainians would vote for incumbent President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 14.9% for Valerii Zaluzhnyi, former commander-in-chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces, and 13.4% for former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov.
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