For the first time in Lostislandic history, no candidate for an executive office managed to secure absolute majority of votes, meaning that leading candidates for Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister will compete in a second round on 25–28 April this year.
Left to right: Denys Tezdzhanenko, Maria Ostroukhova, Elisha Mendelson and Mordechai Linchart.
With 40% of the vote, the incumbent Acting Prime Minister Denys Tezdzhanenko and his running mate, a Russian socialite and opera singer Maria Ostroukhova have received more support than any other candidate. Nonetheless, without an absolute majority they now have to compete in a second round with the closest runners-up Elisha Mendelson, an Israeli videoproducer and his nominee for Deputy Prime Minister, a Rabbi and Freemason Mordechai Linchart, who received 29.1% of the vote. The other two competitors Hannes Bald, a Freemason and former Lostislandic Ambassador to Austria, and Dr. Arvind Kumar Sharma, an Indian diplomat and social activist have received 16.4% and 14.5% of the vote respectively and leave the electoral race.
Held from 18 to 21 April, the election’s first round saw a participation rate of 30% (55 of 183 registered voters) and was made possible in the first place thanks to the resignation of Denys Tezdzhanenko and sacking of government which moved the election one year ahead from 2019. The relatively low turnout is believed to be due to Lostislandic citizens in Russia being unable to access the voting portal as its IP was blocked by the Russian authorities amid the attempts to ban Telegram.
A flat-earther, Euromaidan activist and participant of the anti-terror operation in Eastern Ukraine as a member of the Azov battalion, Denys Tezdzhanenko is seeking his third term as Prime Minister and runs on an anti-establishment program promising to ‘take Lostisland back from corrupt elitists’ and ‘clean out the rat nest’. His choice of a Russian running mate Maria Ostroukhova, a socialite and opera singer explicitly supported by Captain Regent Emeritus Stepan Ignatiev, the now-retired co-creator of Lostisland, might be the sign of a faded animosity between the increasingly outnumbered Russian minority credited with conceiving the organization, and the Western Lostislandic majority.
A relative newcomer to Lostislandic politics, the Israeli radio broadcaster and video producer Elisha Mendelson, together with his nominee for Deputy Prime Minister, a Rabbi and Freemason Mordechai Linhart, rapidly came into prominence by pursuing environmentalism, free-market and direct democracy and received support from nearly one-third of the voters. The Federal Republic of Lostisland has a notable Jewish/Israeli community and these numbers correlate with last year’s referendums on proclaiming Judaism the official religion of Lostisland, endorsed by 30.8% of the voters, and on weekly shutting down of Lostisland’s website for Shabbat observance, endorsed by 23.5%.
The winner of the second round will serve as the Prime Minister of Lostisland until at least 2022 unless he decides to resign early.