Panel on Ukraine’s Parliamentary Elections

By Orest Zakydalsky

On April 11, 2006, a panel entitled The 2006 Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine was held at the Munk Centre for International Studies (University of Toronto). The event was sponsored by the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.

The panel was chaired by Olga Andriewsky (Trent University). The participants were Dominique Arel (Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa), Adrian Karatnycky (Founder and President, The Orange Circle), Inna Pidluska (President, Foundation Europe XXI, Kyiv, Ukraine) and Daniel Bilak (UNDP, Advisor to the Government of Ukraine).

Professor Arel argued that the results of the March parliamentary elections were threefold. First, the parliamentary elections will force the Orange camp to come out of denial about Eastern Ukraine. The vote in the parliamentary election was a carbon copy of the vote in the 2004 Presidential election; the “Orange forces” (Yulia Tymoshenko’s Bloc, Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine-Peoples’ Union and Oleksandr Moroz’s Socialists) won landslide victories in the centre and west of the country, while Yanukovych’s Party of Regions won landslide victories in the eastern provinces. Eastern Ukraine, as the parliamentary elections showed, still reject the Orange agenda. Because the parliamentary elections were largely free of manipulation, the Eastern vote shows that the rejection of the Orange agenda is the result of fundamental societal cleavages. Thus, the Orange camp must deal with this reality.

Second, the parliamentary elections, Arel said, have forced Ukrainian political elites into a condition of permanent coalition-building. Because these elections were run on a fully proportional system, there will be no independents in the next parliament. Further, deputies will no longer be able to switch blocs. Therefore, parliamentary blocs will be forced into coalitions. There are three possible coalitions–an Orange coalition (BYuT, Our Ukraine, Socialists) an Our Ukraine-Regions coalition and a BYuT-Regions coalition. The last two, however, are politically impossible, as a coalition with Yanukovych would be tantamount to political suicide for either Yushchenko or Tymoshenko.

However, while the Party of Regions will not be part of a formal coalition, they many be involved in voting together with either Our Ukraine or BYuT on specific legislation. Because all the parties have an incentive to work together, it is likely that the legislative process will see more pluralism in this parliament. However, because the Party of Regions will not have representation in Cabinet, it will be a challenge to involve them in the government. The challenge for the Party of Regions will be to evolve from a party that represents clan interests in the Donbass to one that represents the voters of Eastern and Southern Ukraine.

Arel argued that the third result of the parliamentary elections is that the Constitutional reform devolving power from the President to the Cabinet and Parliament will likely be solidified. A semi-presidential system seems to be the best guarantor of democratization, as was shown in Central and Eastern Europe. The most important question, Arel said, was whether the political reforms will lead to a new political culture with respect for the rule of law. Ironically, mistrust in political and personal rivals could evolve into trust in political institutions.

Adrian Karatnycky observed that Ukraine is witnessing a fundamental narrowing of ideology in the political elite to a business-friendly policy line. He further said that while there has been a split in the Orange forces, the Party of Regions is perhaps more fundamentally divided. The division in Regions is between pro-business pragmatists who want stability, and are taking a much more pro-European stand, represented chiefly by oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, and those who want to continue to run the Donbass as their personal fiefdom. The latter group has been discredited, and, argued Karatnycky, is on their last breath politically. The gas deal with Russia hit the elites in the Party of Regions the hardest. As a result, there will be no more attempts at moving closer to Russia.

Karatnycky said that Ukraine is moving towards a period of mature development, largely as a result of President Yushchenko’s restraint after his election, and his unwillingness to engage in political witch-hunts against his opponents. Thus, despite looming challenges, Ukraine has turned the corner politically: power is now divided, and the post-communist authoritarian period is over. Most encouragingly, there appears to be developing a clear pro-European majority among Ukrainian elites.

Inna Pidluska said that the election campaign was in many ways flawed. There were serious technical problems: long lineups due to the size of the ballots was the biggest problem. Further, administrative resources were used, but in favour of different political forces, depending on who was stronger in the region in question. The use of administrative resources, however, was locally based, discouraged by the central authorities, and nothing compared to the violations in the 2004 presidential elections.

Pidluska went on to point out that the campaign itself was largely of poor quality. The campaign was personality and not issue-based. Political parties’ platforms were all quite populist, and this was a reflection of a lack of ideas, a lack of ideological development and a lack of understanding in how to issue voters’ concerns.

There was also lack of transparency. For example, when her non-governmental organization (NGO), Foundation Europe XXI, attempted to obtain the biographies of those on party lists, they were told that these biographies were ‘confidential.’ As a result, many politicians and businessmen with questionable pasts and links to criminal organizations were able to get into government. This problem was especially acute in the oblast and municipal elections.

On the positive side, Pidluska argued that the role of mass media and NGOs in the education of voters was substantial. There was a marked improvement in press freedom, although some media outlets continued to practice self-censorship.

Daniel Bilak said that the election is “a Great Leap Forward” in Ukrainian political development. The challenge is for the politicians to catch up to the narod, the people, who are much more politically developed than is the elite. Bilak argued that although the elections represent a watershed in the democratization of Ukraine, it is a mistake to think that the process is irreversible. It can still be uprooted. The most important problem is that the system of decision-making must be changed. For this reason, Bilak argued that the Orange coalition does not have a long life expectancy. Tymoshenko has shown that she is the least interested in changing Ukraine’s system of decision-making and bureaucratic implementation of legislation from a command-administrative to a democratic system. The command-administrative system is still very tempting for political elites, as the lack of transparency and accountability allow for the abuse of power for personal gain.

Bilak said that Our Ukraine ran by far the worst campaign of the main political forces in the country and that Yushchenko’s bloc is dividing into several clans, which puts the bloc in danger of collapse. The local elections, however, were the kernel of real revolution in Ukraine. The change in the system of governance will come, most likely, from local politicians. This depends, however, on whether the local radas or councils can generate a demand for decentralization of power.

Because each of the panelists focused on different aspects of the parliamentary elections, the audience came away with a broad understanding of the implications of this momentous event. Although Ukraine faces very serious and very daunting challenges in its democratization process, it must be said that these elections were a very positive development to that end. Perhaps the most important developments in the long term are that these elections were largely free and fair, the use of administrative resources was relatively minimal, and the press operated and criticized freely. One need only remember Ukrainian political life in the dark days of Leonid Kuchma’s first and second presidential terms to see how far the country has come in what is in reality a very short time.

Orest Zakydalsky is a graduate student at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is studying institutional changes in the democratization process in Ukraine.