1998 Ukrainian parliamentary election

Parliamentary elections were held in Ukraine on 29 March 1998. The Communist Party of Ukraine remained the largest party in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine), winning 121 of the 445 seats, but no party gained a majority of seats, resulting in a hung parliament that eventually resulted in elements of the left supportive of president Leonid Kuchma being placed in leadership positions.

Poor perception of the economy and Kuchma's economic liberalisation programme was a key issue in the election, as was the perception that Kuchma and members of his government were closely connected with Ukrainian oligarchs and members of the Ukrainian mafia and that the Verkhovna Rada's deputies were largely corrupt. Ukraine's oligarch and mafia groups (including leading "clans" such as the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia, the Donetsk Clan and the Kyiv Seven) participated in the election through utilising political parties as front organisations. The 1998 election was the first Ukrainian parliamentary election to used a mixed-member proportional representation system, after the previous election's first-past-the-post system resulted in electoral chaos.

The election was generally considered to be free and fair, though significant discrepancies occurred in Crimea, where members of the Crimean Tatar population were prevented from voting and engaged in violent clashes with police, and in the city of Odesa, where a series of events of electoral violence occurred as part of the simultaneous mayoral election. As a result of the election, no party formed a majority, and a standoff between the left and pro-Kuchma parties occurred for nearly four months before the election of Oleksandr Tkachenko, a member of the leftist bloc with financial connections to Kuchma's government, as Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. Following the election, two of Kuchma's major political opponents (Pavlo Lazarenko and Oleksandr Moroz) were either forced to leave the country amidst corruption charges or subjected to a campaign of media harassment. The election highlighted the civil rights of Crimean Tatars, which continued to be in flux amidst their repatriation from Central Asia.