Thirty parties are registered for '98 elections (12/28/97)

Thirty parties are registered for '98 elections

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's elections to Parliament will feature a very crowded field of political parties, with so many centrist parties registered that a major fragmentation of the vote among them is almost inevitable.

Thirty political parties and blocs met the December 18 deadline for registering for the March 29, 1998, elections by presenting petitions of 200,000 registered voters, with at least 10,000 signatures from each of 14 regions of Ukraine, to the Central Electoral Commission.

Among the 30 are more than 20 parties that are considered democratically inclined, from the right-leaning National Front bloc to the Social Democrats on the other side of center. However, they have failed to form any substantial political blocs, which leaves the center fragmented against a tightly organized group of Communists and Socialists. Many political pundits and politicians believe voters will scatter their votes, leaving few of the centrist parties able to garner the 4 percent required in the new mixed system electoral law to seat candidates in the next Verkhovna Rada.

"It is a sign of the times that so many centrist parties have registered," said Anatolii Matvienko, chairman of the National Democratic Party, which is considered the party of power. "The many parties with a centrist orientation are going to get in the way of one another."

Vyacheslav Chornovil, head of the Rukh Party, said the 30 political choices will "pull the vote apart." He believes that most of the parties that have registered are not true parties but merely groups organized to protect political and individual interests. "Thirty parties is a fiction," said Mr. Chornovil. "There is no such thing as a Liberal Democratic Party or a Christian Democratic Party. There are three parties or political interests: the Communists, Rukh and the party of power, or the nomenklatura. The rest is political clutter."

The Hromada Party, under the guidance of its leader Pavlo Lazarenko, who is considered a master organizer, was the first to register its petitions with the CEC. On December 1, its representatives submitted signatures of 360,000 voters. Publicly, it had claimed to have gathered more than 1 million.

Rukh and the Communist Party came second, submitting their documents almost simultaneously on December 8. Rukh delivered 560,000 voters' signatures, while the Communists presented more than 620,000.

Some controversy has arisen in regard to how votes were gathered. The Hromada Party and the Party of Reform and Order are alleged to have paid workers for the signatures they gathered. There are also allegations that representatives of some political parties went to workers, collectives pressuring people to sign petitions. Rumors also have flown that signatures were collected via post, electronic mail and fax.

However, Yaroslav Davidovich, secretary to the CEC, said that no evidence exists that any of the documents were falsified or that signatures illegally gathered.

At a press conference, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Oleksander Moroz, who is also a leader of the Socialist Party, said he has heard the allegations but that the law on elections is written in such a way that few guidelines were prepared on how petitions were to be gathered. "I have heard that all kinds of questionable procedures for getting petitions were used," said Mr. Moroz. "We are past that stage. I think we should move forward."

The CEC received petitions from 32 of the 54 registered parties in Ukraine. The petitions of the Party of National Salvation and the Women of Ukraine Party were rejected because they did not submit all the required documentation by the deadline.

Other major political parties and the amount of signatures they gathered are as follows: the Peasant and Socialist parties political bloc - 980,000; National Democratic Party - 350,000; the National Front - 400,000; the SLOn (Social-Liberal Union) political bloc - 475,000; the Together (Razom) political bloc of the Labor Party and the Liberal Party; the Christian Democratic Party - 500,000; Ukrainian National Assembly - 230,000.

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