The 2020 Ukrainian local elections took place on Sunday 25 October 2020.^[3][1] In the election, deputies of district councils and rural townships were elected and elections for city mayors were held.^[1][4] In practice this will mean that most voters had to fill out four ballots.^[5] On 15, 22 and 29 November and 6 December 2020 a second round of mayoral elections was held in cities with more than 75,000 voters where no candidate gained more than 50% of the votes.^[2][5][6]

Quick Facts

2020 Ukrainian local elections

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Location of elections throughout Ukraine.

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Due to the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and loss of government control of parts of the Donetsk Oblast and Luhansk Oblast, no elections were held in parts of the two oblasts and no elections in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea were held.^[1] Elections were also held in new raions that were formed following the 2020 administrative reform.

According to the results as published by the Central Election Commission of Ukraine the highest number of seats in the election was won by Servant of the People with 17.59% of local deputies nominated in the election by this party.^[7] Second place was for Fatherland with 12.39% of deputies and in third place was Opposition Platform — For Life with 11.75%.^[7] For the Future gained 11.42% of the total number of seats, European Solidarity 10.73% and Our Land 5.13%.^[7] Independent candidates won 661 mayoral elections.^[8] Of the remaining elected 733 mayors 30.74% of them were Servant of the People candidates, 12.43% represented For the Future, 7.24% Fatherland, 7.1% Opposition Platform — For Life, 6.15% Our Land and 5.6% European Solidarity.^[8] Turnout (on 25 October) was reported at 36.88% by the Central Election Commission, down from almost 47% in the 2015 local elections.^[9][10]

President Volodymyr Zelensky's party, Servant of the People, suffered setbacks in major cities across the country, including the capital Kyiv; meanwhile, pro-European and pro-Russian parties made gains.^[9] In Ukraine's largest cities, not only Servant of the People but all national parties were beaten by local parties of individual city mayors.^[11]

The estimated number of voters is 27.2 million people. The number of voters on the lists at polling stations is estimated at 28.1 million people and the number of polling stations was more than 29,000.^[12]

Late June 2020 the first street political advertising appeared on Ukrainian streets, although the election campaign for the election officially starts on 5 September.^[13] According to Ukrainian law, political campaigning outside election campaign periods is prohibited.^[13]

On 15 July 2020, parliament set the election date to 25 October 2020.^[14]

For the first time in Ukrainian local elections, all candidates had to pay a cash deposit to be able to take part in the elections.^[15] The size of this deposit depends on the size of the population of the place where the election is held.^[15] The lowest deposit were for candidates for mayors of Uzhhorod (19,000 hryvnias), Nikopol (20,000 hryvnias) and Melitopol (24,000 hryvnias); while the highest was for the mayoral candidates of Kyiv (445,000 hryvnias), Kharkiv (219,000 hryvnias), and Dnipro (157,000 hryvnias).^[15]

On all candidate lists, two out of every five candidates had to be female.^[16]

Candidate could only be self-nominated in places with a population of less than 10,000 voters, in all other cases candidates had to be nominated by political parties.^[17]

In the mayoral elections in cities with fewer than 75,000 voters mayors were elected under a majoritarian system; in a first-past-the-post system.^[18] In the other Ukrainian cities a candidate had to receive more than 50% of all votes cast to win in the first round of the election.^[18] If not, the two candidates who received the largest number of votes faced of in a second round, the candidate that receive a simple majority in the second round (no longer necessarily more than 50%) was elected mayor.^[18] November 15, November 22 and November 29 are the dates of the second round of mayoral elections in cities with more than 75,000 voters.^[2] (On 29 November the second round of the mayoral election of Chernivtsi only.^[2]) After Yuriy Vilkul redrew himself from the second round of the mayoral election in Kryvyi Rih this second round was postponed to 6 December 2020.^[6]

In populated places with up to 10 thousand voters the town was divided into constituencies, from 2 to 4 deputies of the local council were elected from each constituency under the relative majority system.^[18] In the other elections voters had to fill in two types of candidate lists - one for the whole city (district or region) and a separate for their electoral district (in which they had to write down the number of their favourite candidate themselves).^[19] The number 1 on the party list of the whole city was guaranteed a place in the local council if the party passed the election threshold.^[19] The election will was held with a specific open list system.^[17] In order to benefit from this open list system, a candidate in an electoral district needed to gain 25% of the total number of votes received by all parties that did overcame the electoral threshold divided by the number of seats in the local council minus the seats won by the number 1's on the party list of the whole city.^[17][19] The elections had a 5% election threshold.^[17]

In practice most voters had to fill out four ballots.^[5] Voters in Kyiv received only two ballots, for the election of the mayor of Kyiv and the Kyiv City Council election.^[5] In Poltava, Kropyvnytskyi, Kryvyi Rih, Kherson and Zhytomyr voters received an additional fifth ballot for candidates for the district councils in the city.^[5]

Deputies of local councils will receive no compensation for their work.^[5]

Due to the new electoral system in which the elections were held, voting officials and the NGO Committee of Voters of Ukraine warned that the official publication of the election results would probably take several days.^[22][23]

The day after the election (26 October 2020) OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights stated that the election had been "calm and well-organized".^[52] It also stated that a non-official poll that had been called for by president Volodymyr Zelensky had created "some illegal political advantage" for Zelensky's party, Servant of the People.^[52]

The NGO Committee of Voters of Ukraine stated that the second round of mayoral elections on 22 November were "held in accordance with democratic standards" but that in five cities of eleven voting cities its observer had uncovered attempts at bribing voters.^[53]