Pro-West, nationalist parties win Ukraine vote: exit polls

 Pro-Western and nationalist parties scored a crushing victory on Sunday in Ukraine's snap parliamentary polls, which were boycotted by pro-Russian rebels in the separatist east, exit polls showed, AFP reports.

The Ukrainian president's Petro Poroshenko Bloc and the People's Front group of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk won 23 and 21 percent of the vote respectively, while the Opposition Party linked to ousted Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych won nearly eight percent, two respected surveys said.

But the vote saw the Communist Party shut out of parliament in elections for the first time since the Soviet era, with the group failing to clear the five-percent threshold, the National Exit Poll survey and a poll conducted by the Rating group said.

The Samopomich (Selfhelp) group of Andriy Sadoviy, the mayor of the western city of Lviv that has long been Ukraine's bedrock of nationalist passions, placed third with nearly 14 percent of the vote.

The Opposition Bloc, which inherited leaders from Yanukovych' now-disbanded Regions Party, finished in a surprisingly strong fourth place with nearly eight percent.

But the Radical Party of the unpredictable nationalist Oleg Lyashko finished a disappointing fifth, collecting just six percent.

A populist who campaigned with a trademark pitchfork, Lyashko had been running in third place and staking a claim on the prime minister's seat.

Corruption-tainted former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko's nationalist Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) group snuck into parliament with six percent, coming in just ahead of the far-right Svoboda (Freedom) party.

Half of the lawmakers in the 450-seat parliament are elected by a proportional representation system where voters choose from a national party list, whose results featured in the two surveys.

The other half of the legislators are chosen by a first-past-the-post constituency system. Those results are expected to come in over the coming days.