Korolevska retracts law suit against public opinion researchers

  The rather surreal law suit brought by leader of the Ukraina Vpered Party against public opinion researchers whose survey found that the party would not reach the requisite 5% threshold has been closed by the court after Korolevska withdrew her claim.

As reported, the claimant had asked on 23 November for a deferment until 29 November in order to obtain evidence of a public opinion survey carried out by the party which predicted different results.

The suit was lodged some 3 weeks before the elections and may have seemed a good political move at the time.  It obviously looked quite different in November when it was clear that Natalia Korolevska’s party had in fact received only 1.58% of the votes.  The suit against two of the most authoritative sociological institutions in the country - the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology - was widely seen as a worrying and unprecedented move. 

In this case, the outcome of the elections made the exercise seem rather comical. The precedent is a bad one in the present climate, and it is worrying that the case was ever accepted for consideration by the Kyiv Economic Court.