Ukrainians resoundingly approve all four referendum proposals

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Exceeding even the most optimistic expectations, Ukrainians voted in large numbers and resoundingly supported all four questions put to them in a national referendum on April 16. More than 80 percent of voters answered in the affirmative to each of the proposals placed before them.

The strong public support for the proposals will put Ukraine's lawmakers in the awkward position of having to amend the Constitution of Ukraine to broadly restructure their Parliament and extend to the president the right to dismiss the legislature should it fail to perform specific required functions.

Although pre-election day surveys had indicated that at least one of the questions, on the creation of a bicameral Parliament, could suffer defeat, a whopping 82 percent expressed their support for such a change to the Constitution. The other three proposals received even greater support.

Fully 90 percent of voters said they want the number of national deputies to the Verkhovna Rada reduced from the current 450 to 300, while another 89 percent said they supported limits on lawmakers' immunity from prosecution.

The vote also indicated that Ukrainians are willing to give the president increased powers over the Verkhovna Rada. Eighty-five percent said the head of state should have the right to dismiss the Verkhovna Rada if it could not develop a parliamentary majority within three months or approve a national budget within a month.

While all the regions of Ukraine decisively supported the four proposals, the west, as it had done in the presidential elections, again showed near unanimity in its choices. (For a breakdown of voting by regions see chart on page 3.)

Three western oblasts, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil, supported three of the four proposals by more than 95 percent each. Even on the most controversial question, whether Ukraine needs a bicameral Parliament, more than 90 percent of these voters said "yes."

The numbers in the east, although still solidly in support of the four proposals, were far lower. At the bottom of the list of the 25 oblasts and administrative regions of Ukraine was the city of Sevastopol in Crimea, as well as the oblasts of Zaporizhia, Kherson and Poltava. But even in these oblasts at least 60 percent of voters voiced approval for each of the four proposals.

On the morning after the vote, while national deputies were busy explaining the complexity and perhaps even the impossibility of making the Constitutional amendments, President Leonid Kuchma told journalists he is extremely pleased with the results.

"I can't help but be happy because there were just too many insinuations surrounding the referendum," said Mr. Kuchma.

The national poll had caused much controversy here and in Europe, where many questioned the constitutionality of the national poll.

The overwhelming support was a decisive political victory for Mr. Kuchma, who had faced various and persistent criticisms in the three months since he had issued a presidential decree scheduling the national referendum. He was vilified by leftist forces and those opposed to his policies for having artificially created through his supporters what he, nonetheless, repeatedly referred to as a popular initiative. Many experts here believe that indeed the petition-gathering that led to the presidential order was not a spontaneous outburst of civic responsibility, but an organized endeavor by people close to the presidential administration who hoped to bring the unwieldy Verkhovna Rada under control through a popular vote. Officially nearly 4 million voters signed petitions calling for a national referendum, which subsequently were certified by Ukraine's Central Election Commission.

The president also faced down the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which had sent a monitoring committee to determine whether the referendum met European standards. When the committee, which had been invited to Ukraine by some members of the Verkhovna Rada, condemned the referendum as unconstitutional and threatened Ukraine with sanctions, Mr. Kuchma answered with a stinging response in which he accused the PACE of intruding into the internal affairs of a sovereign country. However, he assured Europe and the world that Ukraine would abide by the decision of its Constitutional Court, which was still deliberating the issue at the time.

Mr. Kuchma received satisfaction there as well, when the Constitutional Court ruled that four of the six questions listed in the presidential decree were acceptable. The court's decision was in answer to two separate petitions filed by lawmakers who asked the court to give an opinion on the proposals. It also clarified the nature of the referendum - the issue of whether it was to be binding or merely consultative - by stating that the results must be implemented and enforced.

Perhaps the biggest fear held by referendum organizers was that, after all their efforts and troubles, less than 50 percent of the electorate would come to the polls, which would nullify the vote. Their worries were compounded by a late spring. Many believed that on a warm spring Sunday many potential voters would opt to work on their land plots in order to finish spring planting or would simply decide to relax in the sun after a long winter, rather than vote.

So referendum organizers took advantage of a vague law on absentee voting and staged a determined campaign to get the vote out early. With the Central Election Commission's blessing, polling precincts opened fully 10 days before the vote, which caused yet another uproar among opponents of the referendum. But, as CEC Chairman Mykhailo Riabets explained during a press conference on April 14, nothing in the referendum law specifically explains who qualifies for absentee voting.

Mr. Riabets said the Ukrainian law merely states that each individual has the right to vote early, without the need for an acceptable reason, if he cannot make it to the polls the day of the election.

"You may not agree with this, but the law is the law," explained Mr. Riabets.

After all was said and done, 79 percent of Ukrainians had voted by the time the polls closed the evening of April 16, exceeding numbers for both the 1998 Verkhovna Rada vote and the presidential elections last autumn. The CEC determined that 28 percent of Ukraine's electorate voted before April 16. Most active in absentee voting were voters in Dnipropetrovsk, where 47.6 percent voted early, and in the Donetsk region, where 39.5 percent utilized absentee ballots.

The extraordinary effort to get the vote out early provided opportunities for voting fraud, according to some political experts.

There were allegations that school teachers told students to push their parents to vote, and that demands were made of parents to go to the polls lest their children not be registered for the next school year.

National Deputy Petro Symonenko, leader of the Communist Party, said he had reports that militia had organized a door-to-door campaign to ask people to vote early. At certain factories employees were told to vote during working hours, while in Luhansk the government told factory managers to document how many of its workers had voted.

Mr. Symonenko called the referendum "a step towards dictatorship and the liquidation of democratic norms."

The Committee of Ukrainian Voters, which has earned respect for its monitoring of past Ukrainian votes, also mentioned undue and possibly illegal agitation by government authorities to get out the vote early.

"Nearly one-third came to vote early because factory directors, college deans and school principals put pressure on voters to vote early," said Ihor Popov, director of the Committee of Ukrainian Voters.

In a press release the election watch-dog group went so far as to suggest that a proper investigation of referendum procedures and tactics could call the referendum results into question, but said that such an inquiry was unrealistic given the political climate.

Meanwhile, CEC Chairman Riabets acknowledged that he had received complaints of undue pressure by government officials being put on citizens to vote, which he said would be investigated.

The rousing show of support for the proposals on the April 16 ballot must now be ratified by the Verkhovna Rada to effectively become amendments to the Constitution. That, however, will not come easily: first, because the procedure for amending the Constitution is drawn out over two legislative sessions and requires that eventually two-thirds of the lawmakers must support the separate amendments as they are finally written; and second, because many lawmakers say that at least one of the proposals is so vague that it will take considerable time and energy to structure it in a specific and understandable manner.

National Deputy Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of Ukraine and currently head of the majority coalition in the Parliament, said at a press conference on April 17 that the question on the president's power to dismiss the Parliament should it not pass a budget within 30 days will cause problems for the lawmakers.

"What if the Verkhovna Rada passes a budget on the 29th day and submits it to the president, who then vetoes the bill because it does not reflect his budget strategy? A question arises, did the Verkhovna Rada pass the budget or does the president's veto nullify it?"

He said that an associated philosophical question exists as well. What is a national deputy, who must fulfill the mandate given to him by his constituency while supporting the presidential agenda, to do when the two come into conflict?

Lawmakers will also have trouble deciding on how to implement the proposal on a bicameral Parliament. Verkhovna Rada First Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk said that much work would need to be done to construct and pass an amendment creating a bicameral legislature.

"The decision of April 16 had a political, not a legal character," explained Mr. Medvedchuk. "The answer 'yes' did not create anything." He said that now the lawmakers need to pass from 32 to 40 laws to lay the groundwork for the constitutional amendment.

President Kuchma is expected to submit draft laws to the Verkhovna Rada and his recommendations within days after the official results of the referendum are published. The Verkhovna Rada plans to discuss the bills and vote on their wording during this session, which ends in July. A vote on the final bills will take place during the following parliamentary session, as required by the Constitution. That session begins in September.

REFERENDUM RESULTS BY REGION

Following is the breakdown of results by region in the voting on four referendum questions in Ukraine. The questions asked pertained to: 1. granting the president additional power to dismiss the Verkhovna Rada; 2. limiting national deputies' immunity from prosecution and arrest; 3. decreasing the number of national deputies from 450 to 300; and 4. creating a bicameral Parliament.

Oblast No. 1 No. 2 No. 3 No. 4
Cherkasy 85.75 89.12 89.88 82.88
Chernihiv 80.26 84.62 85.77 77.56
Chernivtsi 90.18 91.84 92.33 85.66
Dnipropetrovsk 82.51 87.23 88.87 77.95
Donetsk 90.43 92.52 93.18 89.52
Ivano-Frankivsk 95.25 95.93 96.22 92.15
Kharkiv 78.74 85.69 87.27 78.48
Kherson 74.49 80.63 81.75 72.53
Khmelnytskyi 83.31 87.22 88.24 79.59
Kirovohrad 85.36 89.94 90.61 82.88
Kyiv 85.70 89.62 90.28 81.47
Luhansk 86.09 91.13 91.93 85.86
Lviv 92.70 93.87 94.36 85.32
Mykolaiv 82.06 87.26 88.27 80.26
Odesa 86.62 90.18 91.04 85.24
Poltava 73.02 80.27 81.38 70.71
Rivne 92.92 94.74 95.20 89.31
Sumy 89.43 92.76 92.39 88.25
Ternopil 95.12 95.69 96.04 91.60
Vinnytsia 81.44 86.96 87.61 79.12
Volyn 90.41 92.15 92.95 86.50
Zakarpattia 95.89 96.62 96.88 94.48
Zaporizhia 75.62 81.96 83.57 72.43
Zhytomyr 85.21 89.51 90.26 80.58
city of Kyiv 75.86 84.97 86.29 65.17
city of Sevastopol 60.24 73.47 74.20 61.05
Crimean Auton. Rep. 70.12 81.01 82.89 68.16

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 23, 2000, No. 17, Vol. LXVIII

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