An Election Primer

By Walter Kish

The Parliamentary election campaign is now well underway in Ukraine, with a little over a month to go until the March 26 voting day.

The television airwaves are choked with banal political ads. The billboards along most roadways in Kyiv assault the passing motorist or pedestrian with cliche slogans and promises that are trite, ironic or hypocritical. How is one to respond to promises by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions to ensure a responsible, honest government with the people’s best interests at heart?

There are some 45 parties contending in the election, but realistically no more that six or seven will succeed in meeting the threeper cent minimum. Coming into effect this election is the requirement that a party must receive at least three per cent of the vote to send representatives to parliament under a new proportional representation system. Parties likely to reach this minimum are the aforementioned Party of Regions as well as Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc, the Tymoshenko bloc, Moroz’s Socialist party, the Communists, the Lytwyn bloc, and possibly the Natalia Vitrenko bloc.

Recent polls suggest that the first three will each garner somewhere between 15 to 30 per cent of the vote, the Socialists about 7 to 9 per cent, the Communists and the Lytwyn bloc 4 to 5 per cent, and Vitrenko may squeak in with just over 3 per cent of the vote. Needless to say, the major activity of virtually all these parties currently consists of backroom wheeling and dealing to try to form a majority coalition in parliament subsequent to the election.

Readers outside Ukraine are no doubt interested in what these different political forces represent, so I will endeavour to provide a simple summary of what they stand for. The Party of Regions, regardless of what their political literature may say, has shown itself to be the party of oligarchs and big business, intent on using political office to accumulate as much wealth and power as possible. Some may see it as a raw, unpolished version of the Bush-era Republicans.

Yushchenko’s bloc is the most similar to our western notions of a liberal, democratic, capitalist-oriented party, comparable to the Liberals in Canada or the Democrats in the United States. Tymoshenko’s ideology is similar in most respects to Yushchenko’s, except in her approach to implementation. Yushchenko is more a proponent of “laissez faire” market forces, whereas Tymoshenko believes in strong government intervention in guiding economic development.

Moroz’s Socialist Party is comparable to many of the more left-leaning European Socialist parties that believe in democracy and capitalism, but under the control and guidance of a strong government focused on social welfare. As for the Communists, there is little difference between the current crop in Ukraine and their predecessors who believed in an unrealistic utopia under the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Their numbers have been steadily declining and their remaining supporters are primarily aging pensioners with nostalgia for the stable, dependable old days of the Soviet Union.

The ideology of Lytwyn’s bloc reflects the image that the current Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada has managed to create for himself as a neutral, centrist politician that can play the peacemaker role and broker effective compromises. It is hard to pin down where he fits on the political spectrum, largely because he has made a determined effort to avoid being politically defined, preferring to be all things to all people. He will appeal to the undecided voters who will “park” their votes with him until the political environment evolves and clarifies itself into something more stable.

Lastly there is Natalya Vitrenko’s bloc, which represents what I can only call the rabid and reactionary leftist and pro-Russian extreme of Ukrainian politics. She is all for letting Western Ukraine and Zakarpattya split off into an autonomous entity and unifying the rest of Ukraine with Russia and Belarus. Until that happens, she proposes making Russian an official state language, instituting dual Russian and Ukrainian citizenship, and merging all the Ukrainian churches into the Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate. Needless to say, she is against private land ownership, and solidly against Ukraine joining the EU, NATO or the WTO. Remarkably, there are enough people in Ukraine who think similarly so that she just might get the minimum three percent of the vote required to attain representation in Parliament.

There are also many small fringe parties representing different interest groups such as the pensioners, the environmentalists, the military, various ethnic and religious groups – all of who have little hope of electing anyone to parliament, yet participate in the election for publicity and self-promotion. Some even lend the affair some much-needed comic relief. One of my favourites is the Ukrainian National Assembly, which hopes to reinstitute a Hetman state. The Hetman, who would be elected for a five-year term, would be held accountable for his rule in an interesting manner. At the end of his term the electorate would vote on either re-electing him, dismissing him, or in the event of misrule, they could opt to confiscate all his personal property and put him in prison for up to the rest of his life. Now there’s a novel idea for you!