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Early mayoral elections to take place in Krivoi Rog

Fifteen candidates are going to run for the post

KIEV, March 27 /TASS/. The people in the city of Krivoi Rog, Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk region, are going to elect a new mayor in runoff elections.

Fifteen candidates are going to run for the post. The election race favorites include two candidates - the incumbent city mayor Yuri Vilkul from the Party of Regions who suspended his activities in 2014 and Semyon Semenchenko, a Ukrainian parliament deputy and a representative of the Samopomoch (Self-Help) party.

Other candidates include Nikolai Kolesnik, the curator of the Krivbas battalion; Oleg Boichenko, a representative of the nationalist Svoboda party; Igor Levitsky, a nominee of the People’s Control public movement; Oleg Kosyak, the head of the law department of the local branch of the Zaporozhye Institute of Economy and Information Technologies (self-nominee); unemployed Natalya Levitskaya; human rights activist Inna Ivanchenko; a construction company head, Yana Berkut; Alexander Natarov, a storehouse head at one of the enterprises.

Yuri Vilkul won the second round of mayoral elections in Krivoi Rog on November 15, 2015. However, his rival from the Samopomoch party Yuri Milobog accused Vilkul of election fraud. That triggered rallies in Krivoi Rog whose participants demanded runoff election. Pickets were also held outside the parliamentary building in Kiev.

Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada passed a bill on runoff elections of the city mayor in Krivoi Rog under pressure from the Samopomoch party on December 23. Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko signed that bill into law on January 30, 2016.