Communist Party draws nearly 25 percent support in Ukraine's parliamentary elections (04/05/98)

Communist Party draws nearly 25 percent
support in Ukraine's parliamentary elections

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Communist Party of Ukraine won a convincing victory in elections to the Verkhovna Rada on March 29, finishing well ahead of the Rukh Party as well as Ukraine's political center.

Although political pundits are predicting that the results of Ukraine's second democratically held parliamentary elections since independence in 1991 will change little in the composition and the paralysis of the 450-member Verkhovna Rada, even political opponents to the Communists agree that their victory was stronger than foreseen.

"What would you expect when wages, pensions and stipends are not paid out?" asked Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma at a press conference with Finland's president on March 30. "We should get on our knees and thank the pensioners who limited the extent to which they voted the way they did."

Pensioners, as predicted, along with residents of rural areas and citizens of Crimea overwhelmingly supported the Communists.

President Kuchma also criticized those who had supported the mixed election system law by which these elections were run and those political centrists who could not find room for compromise to form a united center. "(The election results) will come as a cold shower to many politicians," said Mr. Kuchma.

Voters cast two votes: one for a specific candidate to directly represent their district and one for a political party of their choice.

In the voting by party, the Communist Party, which had been predicted to win about 17 percent of voter support, finished much stronger, at 24.7 percent. The Rukh Party, whose standing was slipping in the final weeks of the parliamentary races, according to election polls, finished a respectable 9.4 percent in the real thing. After Rukh came the Socialist Party/Agrarian Party bloc at 8. 54 percent and the Green Party at 5.46 percent.

In all, eight political parties passed the minimum 4 percent mark in the vote for parties in the mixed election system that Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada instituted for these elections. Candidates from party lists will occupy 225 seats in the Parliament.

In the single-mandate, direct representation portion of the vote, by which the other 225 seats to the Verkhovna Rada were filled, independents took the most seats with 114. After them came the Communists with 39 elected representatives, then Rukh with 13, followed by the National Democratic Party (NDP), considered the "party of power," with six.

The NDP, which is considered closest to President Kuchma and includes amongs its members Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko, achieved a humble total of 23 seats in the new Ukrainian Parliament. NDP Chairman Anatolii Matvienko at a press conference on April 1 called the results "a defeat for the democratic forces."

President Kuchma said that, regardless of the outcome, he feels that a sufficient numbers of centrist and democratic national deputies in the Parliament will work with the president, and that he is ready to work with them. "This Parliament will be no worse than the old one," said the president.

The Communists, who have won a total of 123 seats (43 more than in the previous Parliament) will not have a majority. However, because other leftist parties and political blocs also received strong electoral support, the left may find the votes needed to pass legislative measures on broad, social-based issues, such as raising the minimum wage and paying long overdue wages and pensions.

The leftist political parties are far from being a united front. The leader of the Progressive Socialists, Natalia Vitrenko, in the past has regularly criticized Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko as well as Socialist Party leader and Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Oleksander Moroz.

A fight may yet ensue over the chairman's seat, as well. Mr. Symonenko said on April 1 that he does not exclude the possibility of nominating his own party member for the position.

Also, almost one-quarter of the newly elected national deputies were elected as independents, therefore, the alliances they forge or the factions they enter will, in large part, determine the strength of the political left.

Former President Leonid Kravchuk, who was at the top of the slate of the Social Democratic Party-United and whose party barely made it over the 4 percent hurdle with 4.02 percent, said the independents are not likely to contribute to the strength of the Communists in the Parliament. "These are not the sort of people who are going to strike alliances with the Communists, or press ahead for a change in policies or press for the impeachment of the president," said Mr. Kravchuk on April 2.

The Communists led in most regions in party voting. However, in the west, long a stronghold of national democrats, the Rukh Party finished on top in all but two of the six oblasts that make up the region. They placed second in Zakarpattia behind the Social Democratic Party-United and finished well behind the Communist Party in the Chernivtsi Oblast.

The only other party to win an oblast was Pavlo Lazarenko's Hromada Party, which took 35.3 percent of the vote in Mr. Lazarenko's Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

In Crimea, where authorities had prepared for the staging of civil demonstrations by Crimean Tatars on election day over perceived denial of their voting rights, everything was calm. As expected, since a large percentage of Crimea's voting population is on pensions and there is strong pro-Russian sentiment among the peninsula's populace, Communists received 39 percent of the vote, followed by the Soyuz Party, whose platform calls for reunion with Russia, with 10 percent.

Ukrainian voters had much to choose from on March 29, with 30 parties listed on the ballots along with almost two dozen candidates in each voting district. In addition ballots for local and district leaders were included, which made for long lines at the polling districts. In some polls, voters were handed as many as five ballots to fill out.

The cumbersome balloting resulted in violations of election procedures that most international and domestic observers have judged to be insufficient to have influenced the final results.

The Committee of Voters of Ukraine, the largest of the observer organizations in place, had 17,356 monitors located at polling stations throughout Ukraine on March 29. It described the elections as "in general, open and free." The major violation noted was in the lack of privacy during voting.

Because of the long lines, many voters filled out their ballots not in the voting booths provided, but at tables, on window ledges and, at times, on each others' backs. Some observers even reported people going outside on the sunny election Sunday to vote at picnic tables or on the concrete steps of the schools and office buildings, where polling stations are typically established.

Voter turnout nationwide was 64.6 percent, down approximately 10 percent from 1994, but still a much higher percentage of the eligible voters than in most Western countries, including the United States (where voter turnout in the last presidential election was 49 percent).

The Ukrainian voters returned at least 90 national deputies to office by electing them in the single-mandate portion of the elections. Additional national deputies were re-elected on party tickets, but those numbers had not yet been determined by the CEC.

Ukrainian voters also double-elected 44 candidates, who now must decide whether they will take their seats as representatives of the party on whose ticket they ran, or whether they will represent the electoral district that picked them.

Twelve Communist Party candidates who ran both on the party lists and in single-mandate voting districts must now decide which seat they will take.

As proof of how difficult it would have been to elect a sufficient number of legislators to this Parliament without a new election law, CEC Chairman Mykhailo Riabets cited the fact that if the 1994 election law had remained in effect only 19 candidates would have met the combined requirements of 50 percent voter turnout and a "50 plus one" majority vote needed to avoid a run-off. In the 1994 elections, some areas of Ukraine went to the polls four or five times to elect a national deputy. And some districts, many of them in Kyiv, never elected representative.