ANALYSIS: Grenade attack on Vitrenko lets genie out of the bottle (10/17/99)

ANALYSIS

Grenade attack on Vitrenko lets genie out of the bottle

by Jan Maksymiuk
RFE/RL Newsline

At about 8 p.m. on October 2, two assailants threw two hand grenades into a crowd surrounding presidential hopeful Natalya Vitrenko following a campaign meeting in Inhuletsk, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The blast reportedly injured more than 30 people, including Ms. Vitrenko and her aide Volodymyr Marchenko. The motives for the attempt on 48-year-old Ms. Vitrenko's life remain unknown. Meanwhile, the incident may have an impact on the election campaign as a whole as well as voters' preferences in the October 31 ballot, given that the public tends to sympathize with the assailed, rather than the assailants.

Ms. Vitrenko, the only woman candidate in the October 31 elections, heads the Progressive Socialist Party. In 1996 she quit Oleksander Moroz's Socialist Party, accusing Moroz of "bourgeois views." She went on to launch her own party, which won 14 parliamentary seats in the March 1998 elections.

Ms. Vitrenko's platform for the presidential elections combines fierce populism, nostalgia for the Soviet era, and strong anti-Western sentiments. Polls in Ukraine, which many believe to be unreliable and biased, consistently put her in second or third place, after President Leonid Kuchma and Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko. In the mock presidential elections held among more than 100,000 Ukrainian students on September 28, Ms. Vitrenko won 12.57 percent backing to come in second after Mr. Kuchma.

It appears that Ms. Vitrenko's election appeal is not limited to any specific social or professional group. As the support she won among students shows, her rhetoric appeals to various social strata. And all press reports about her campaign meetings - regardless of whether reporters are favorable or hostile toward her - underscore the fact that those meetings are usually well attended and animated. Ms. Vitrenko is not only a populist, but also a popular candidate.

Many Ukrainian commentators have suggested that the presidential administration initially supported Ms. Vitrenko's political career and her current presidential bid in an attempt to split Ukraine's leftist electorate - especially that of Moroz - and pave the way for Kuchma's re-election. To support that argument, those commentators note that several months ago Ms. Vitrenko was seen on Ukrainian state-controlled television almost every day, while other left-wing leaders were granted only rare coverage. They also believe that in exchange for those official favors, Ms. Vitrenko's parliamentary caucus has on several occasions blocked anti-Kuchma legislation in the Verkhovna Rada.

It is revealing that Ms. Vitrenko has now virtually disappeared from the state-controlled electronic media. In fact, if the Kuchma-Vitrenko collaboration theory holds water, her disappearance from that media may mean she has already fulfilled her mission of splitting the leftist vote.

It may also mean, however, that the presidential entourage senses an "electoral danger" to Mr. Kuchma from Ms. Vitrenko herself. Some observers have already voiced the opinion that by promoting Ms. Vitrenko's political career, President Kuchma has let the genie out of the bottle and may now face a powerful challenge from the candidate he apparently wanted to use as a mere tool against his political foes.

The case of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka in Belarus provides an interesting parallel to that of Ms. Vitrenko in Ukraine. In 1993, then Prime Minister Vyachaslau Kebich used Mr. Lukashenka, an unknown lawmaker at that time, in the power struggle against Supreme Soviet Chairman Stanislau Shushkevich. Mr. Kebich gave Mr. Lukashenka the go-ahead to deliver a parliamentary report on corruption, which resulted in Mr. Shushkevich's ouster. But that report simultaneously placed Mr. Lukashenka in the nationwide spotlight and made him a popular hero. In July 1994, Mr. Lukashenka won a landslide victory on an extreme populist ticket in the country's first presidential elections. Among the losers were both Merrs. Shushkevich and Kebich.

Moreover, during the 1994 presidential campaign in Belarus, Mr. Lukashenka's election team claimed that someone had made an attempt on the candidate's life by shooting at him when he was travelling by car to a campaign meeting. Investigators found neither assailants nor convincing evidence that Mr. Lukashenka's life had been threatened, but the incident was widely reported. Some commentators continue to assert that Mr. Lukashenka staged the assassination in order to boost his popularity. In any case, Mr. Lukashenka garnered almost 80 percent support in the 1994 ballot.

The October 2 grenade attack on Ms. Vitrenko will likely reinforce her already relatively strong standing as a presidential hopeful and within the political arena as a whole. Simultaneously, it may weaken the position of the incumbent president and, possibly, some other candidates.

There have already been many allegations and complaints that the authorities have violated election legislation and harassed President Kuchma's rivals. The armed attack against one of the candidates will only add to the general atmosphere of distrust, uncertainty and dissatisfaction in a country plagued by economic inefficiency and endangered by political authoritarianism.

| Home Page |