Ukrainian President Zelenskyy Party's Lead Slips To $47.5% - Poll

Servant of the People, a Ukrainian party that nominated incumbent Volodymyr Zelensky for presidency, has seen its popularity edge down 0.7 percentage points to 47.5 percent

KIEV (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 12th June, 2019) Servant of the People, a Ukrainian party that nominated incumbent Volodymyr Zelensky for presidency, has seen its popularity edge down 0.7 percentage points to 47.5 percent.

Wednesday's poll by the national Rating agency put the second-placed Opposition Platform far behind with only 10.4 percent of votes, down from 10.7 percent a week before.

European Solidarity of ex-President Petro Poroshenko was on 7.9 percent after losing a tenth of a point, while former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's Fatherland climbed 0.6 points to 7.5 percent.

President Zelenskyy, who was voted in spring on promises of social justice and change, has called a snap parliamentary election for July 21.

His spokesman, Andriy Gerus, was forced on the defensive on Wednesday after saying that Zelenskyy had "joked" about cutting the costs of housing and communal services.

Zelenskyy complained about inflated housing prices in Ukraine during the campaign. Dmytro Razumkov, leader of the Servant party, said in May that Zelenskyy would fix the tariffs after the parliamentary vote.

But Gerus said in an interview to the bihus.info publication that Zelenskyy "never directly promised to cut tariffs." He added that the would-be president joked about how corrupt the system setting tariffs was. He soon took to Facebook to apologize for his "badly worded" remark.