KIEV, Oct. 15 – The Central Election Commission on Monday ended 15 days of official ballot counting by announcing final vote tallies confirming that pro-Western groups won a slim parliamentary majority in the Sept. 30 election.

The group led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine-People’s Self-defense jointly outperformed pro-Russian groups and will be able to form the government soon without the need for street protest.

The Tymoshenko group and Our Ukraine-People’s Self-defense will control 228 seats in the 450-seat Parliament, while Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych’s Regions Party and its pro-Moscow ally Communist Party will jointly control 202 seats.

The group led by former Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, a centrist group, will control 20 seats, according to the commission. The group has been invited to join the pro-Western coalition, but is yet to respond, Tymoshenko said.

The Socialist Party, led by Parliament Speaker Oleksandr Moroz, will be eliminated from Parliament after failing to clear the 3% threshold required for parties to enter the legislature. The party, which collected 2.86%, was punished by voters for its surprise alliance with the Regions Party last year.

The Regions Party collected 34.37% of the vote at the election, Volodymyr Shapoval, the head of the CEC, announced on Monday while disclosing the final vote tallies.

The Tymoshenko group scored 30.71% of the vote, while Our Ukraine-People’s Self-defense got 14.15% of the vote, followed by the Communist Party’s 5.39% and the Lytvyn group’s 3.96%, according to Shapoval.

The Regions Party, which will have 175 seats, will control the largest single group in Parliament, while the Tymoshenko group will control 156 seats and Our Ukraine-People’s Self-defense will control 72 seats. The Communists will control 27 seats and the Lytvyn group will control 20 seats.

The commission must officially publish the results within the next five days, which should open way for the first session of the next Parliament that should vote to approve the coalition and the government.

Other important statistics numbers from the Sept. 30 that has been announced by the commission on Monday include the turnout at 62.02%.

Some 23.3 million voters cast ballots, while the number of registered voters was reported at about 37.99 million.

The Regions Party was supported by 8.01 million voters, followed by the Tymoshenko group’s 7.16 million, Our Ukraine-People’s Self-defense’s 3.3 million, the Communist Party’s 1.28 million and the Lytvyn Bloc’s 924,000 voters, according to the commission. (--by Olena Banas)