Petro Symonenko

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Simonenko presidential election poster in 2004

Petro Mykolayovich Symonenko (born August 1, 1952 in Donetsk) is the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Symonenko was the Communist candidate in the 1999 and 2004 presidential elections. He became a member of the Soviet Communist Party since 1978, and has been party chairman since 1993. He is the Chairman of the Communist Party Faction in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament).^[1]

He is a Ukrainian delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. From 1994 to 1996 he was a member of the Ukrainian parliament's Constitution Commission.

He was a candidate in the 1999 presidential election, receiving 22.24% of the votes in the first round and taking second place. In the second round he won 37.8% of the votes, losing to Leonid Kuchma. His election program has classic communist content. Symonenko's support sharply declined at the time of the 2004 presidential election, largely because Kuchma could not run and some of his former supporters had defected from his party.^{[citation needed]} Symonenko received 5% of the votes and came in fourth place, unable to get into the controversial runoff which would cause the Orange Revolution.

Symonenko was re-elected to the Verkhovna Rada in the September 2007 parliamentary election.^[2] At the opening of the new parliament's first session on November 23, 2007, he was re-elected as Chairman of the Communist Party faction.^[1]

Commenting in 2007 on the Holodomor, Symonenko said he "does not believe there was any deliberate starvation at all," and accused President Viktor Yushchenko of "using the famine to stir up hatred." In response, Yushchenko declared he wants "a new law criminalising Holodomor denial."^[3]