http://www.canada.com/news/Ukraine+bodybuilder+flexes+muscles+election+campaign/2441577/story.htmlBorrowing a page from macho Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, famous for riding bare-chested on a horse to promote his image, a proudly muscular businessman has emerged as a potentially decisive force in Ukraine's presidential vote Sunday.
Multimillionaire banker Serhiy Tyhypko, an amateur bodybuilder who appeared last month on the cover of a Ukrainian men's health magazine, had recently been polling a strong third to front-runner Viktor Yanukovych and second-place Yulia Tymoshenko.
That put the "Strong Ukraine" party leader, whose election slogan is
"A strong president — a strong country," in an enviable position. He could emerge a queen-maker and possible future prime minister if, as expected, he threw his support behind Tymoshenko, the current prime minister, in the second round of voting on Feb. 7, according to European Council on Foreign Relations analyst Andrew Wilson.
But a newly published poll has him essentially in a tie for second with Tymoshenko, raising the startling possibility he could make it onto the second-round ballot against Yanukovych.
While several analysts questioned Thursday the credibility of the poll by the Russian state-owned firm VTsIOM, Wilson said a Tyhypko surge into second place isn't far-fetched.
The candidate's ascendancy has as much to do with money, and Ukrainians' frustration with the country's three bickering leaders over the past five years, as it has to do with his impressive physique, say analysts.
"There was always a space for this kind of candidate," said Wilson, author of The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation.
"Ukraine has had the same troika for a long time, and people have had to varying degrees become very disillusioned."
He was referring to the ever-feuding threesome of Yanukovych, the loser of the fraud-tainted 2004 presidential election, and the two Orange Revolution heroes that year — Tymoshenko and discredited President Victor Yushchenko, who is also a candidate Sunday but is polling in the low single-digits.
The three rivals have been at each others' throats throughout the campaign, throwing around zingers such as Tymoshenko's charge this week that Yanukovych's refusal to debate her — he is a notoriously inept public speaker — suggests he doesn't "have the brains" to lead the country.
All three have suggested their rivals are planning massive electoral fraud.
The upstart Tyhypko, meanwhile, has stayed above the fray as he promises to deal with the country's endemic corruption and a devastated economy that shrank 15 per cent last year and is on the International Monetary Fund's life-support system.
"He's polite and professional rather than vain and rude, he's benefited from his time out of politics so he looks like a fresh face, he's genuinely a very good campaigner, and he's got lots of his own money," according to Wilson.
Tyhypko, 49, said Wednesday he's already pumped $11 million U.S. of his own fortune, estimated at around $350 million, into the campaign.
TV screens and billboards bombard voters with images of him in an expensive business suit, looking relaxed and managerial, although photographs can also be found of him on the Internet pumping iron in the gym.
Despite his outsider image, he is an ex-communist turned private banker who is cut from the same cloth of most of the poor country's elite, dominated by former communist party insiders who used their clout and connections to became profoundly wealthy buying up bargain-basement state assets after independence from the old Soviet Union in 1991.
Tyhypko, who studied metallurgy and economics in university, was a senior activist in Ukraine's Young Communist League in the late 1980s, first as head of "propaganda and agitation" and later as the organization's first secretary.
He established one of the country's largest private banks after independence and soon became an economic adviser to President Leonid Kuchma, whose presidency from 1994-2005 was plagued by corruption scandals, crackdowns on press freedom and the mysterious disappearances of journalists.
In 1999, he became minister of the economy and, in 2002, was appointed chairman of Ukraine's National Bank.
In 2004, he ran Yanukovych's presidential election campaign and resigned after the candidate's victory was overturned due to widespread fraud.
Historian David Marples, a director at the University of Alberta-based Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, said Tyhypko would have at least a 50-50 shot of becoming president if he makes it to the second round.
"The emergence of Serhiy Tyhypko as a possible late contender is an indicator of voter dissatisfaction with the two leading candidates, but especially Yanukovych," Marples wrote in an e-mail Thursday.
