Use of government resources emerges as an issue as Rada elections approach

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - As lawmakers from Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada gear up for the March 2002 elections and as the first strategies are implemented, the issue of government administrative resources and how they will affect the races has become an increasingly important issue here.

There is widespread belief among the population and acknowledgment among political experts that those who hold power or have direct access to it - and that means some ability to control government finances as well - will have a direct bearing on how the political campaigns play out and who the winners will be.

What is not yet certain, and probably will only become apparent after the results are in sometime after March 31, is how the use of government power in the form of media access, public relations strategies, influences over cadres and just plain old money will affect the outcome of the vote.

During a roundtable held on December 18, sponsored by the Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies, the consensus reached by an array of experts was that the degree of influence would vary. However, most agreed that of Ukraine's 127 political parties, those positioned politically closest to the presidential structures would benefit the most.

That same day the Razumkov Center issued a report on expectations and political scenarios in the run-up to the March 31 parliamentary elections in which it noted that: "the use of administrative resources in the upcoming parliamentary elections of 2002 will be sufficiently high." The center also reported that in a recently conducted survey about half of Ukrainians agreed with that assertion.

The same report claimed that only about 3 percent of the population actually would succumb to pressure from government structures to vote a certain way. However, those who represent political interests that will have no access to the political benefits the government can supply say the influence will be much stronger.

"Even today, everywhere we look as we prepare for the elections, we see administrative resources at work. All the major parties will be utilizing them. The structures opposed to the president have no chance," explained National Deputy Natalia Vitrenko, an influential presidential candidate in 1999, who leads the small, radical Progressive Socialist Party.

During a speech in a hall adjoining the Razumkov Center roundtable, President Leonid Kuchma, whose office would have the most influence over how administrative resources are allocated to political organizations, rejected any such possibility.

"It simply will not be possible. There will be more [election] observers in Ukraine for this election than anywhere else ever," explained the president. "Merely from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe there will be some 3,000.

Illegal but prevalent

While the use of government administrative resources is illegal according to Article 71 of the Constitution of Ukraine, which states that elections to both central and local government bodies should be free, held on the basis of even and equal possibilities for all, and conducted via secret ballot, this has not stopped illegal practices in the past. In the 1999 presidential elections there were various allegations of election improprieties, including students being forced by their rectors and deans to come to class on Election Day, during which they were instructed for whom to vote.

The OSCE, which has monitored the last three Ukrainian elections, including the presidential vote of 1999 and the two previous parliamentary elections, held in 1994 and 1998, said of the most recent elections to the Parliament: "Violations were extensive, coordinated and planned."

During the Razumkov Center seminar, citations abounded of examples of how administrative resources could be utilized to give political parties an advantage in the upcoming election campaign.

The most obvious way described would be to convince department heads within the various government ministries to let their cadres know in no uncertain yet subtle ways for whom to vote. The Razumkov Center underscored in its report that the Ministry of Defense, for example, has 300,000 military personnel who are accustomed to carrying out orders. The Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Culture have a combined 2.2 million individuals they can influence, either workers directly employed by the ministries or people such as teachers and professors whom they can shower with propaganda and literature.

Factory workers and agricultural workers also could be easily influenced by factory managers, especially since unemployment is high and workers understand they are replaceable by others just as eager to work.

Even straightforward and seemingly benign actions that government officials could take during the campaign season could affect the vote. Anatolii Hrytsenko, director of the Razumkov Center, said that, for example, whether the government schedules the Days of Russia festivities - which could affect the attitude towards Russian culture held by a person who attends the event - just prior to the elections or sometime in April could influence how individuals vote, especially since past history has shown that at least a quarter of the voting public in Ukraine remains undecided until the last days before an election.

Mass media a crucial factor

The Razumkov Center study and the participants of the conference concluded that the mass media will again be a central factor in the campaign process and that there is no reason not to believe that those who control media outlets could again manipulate both printed and electronic media. It said that political and business entities owned by members of the major political parties or blocs that will dominate the election process control the major national channels. It provided the following list: Studio 1+1, Inter, TET are controlled by the Social Democratic Party (United); Ukrainian Television-1, ICTV and STV by the Labor Ukraine Party; and UTAR by the Batkivschyna Party.

Not all the leading parties would be in line for the same piece of the pie if administrative resource handouts do indeed occur. A pecking order already seems to exist, but it is subject to change even without a moments notice.

The Social Democratic Party, which has the largest media holdings, including influence over some of the largest newspapers in Kyiv, is in a state of flux and disorganization after its chairman, the powerful First Vice-Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Viktor Medvedchuk, was removed from his parliamentary post by an unexpected majority vote of lawmakers on December 13. The party, with a slew of the richest men in Ukraine, including Dynamo Kyiv soccer team owner Hryhorii Surkis and ex-president Leonid Kravchuk, will go to the elections independent of any bloc.

It had been expected to be among those most able to utilize what the government could offer. But in the last weeks it has become apparent that Social Democrats in leading central government and oblast leadership positions were being shuffled out of office and the party was becoming increasingly ostracized by government officials.

Administrative resources a key

On the other hand, experts believe that if any administrative resources are to be doled out, the For a United Ukraine bloc, chaired by President Kuchma's chief of staff and closest confidante, Volodymyr Lytvyn, should get first dibs.

The bloc includes the Labor Ukraine Party, chaired by the influential banker and National Deputy Serhii Tyhypko and boasting a powerful member, Mr. Kuchma's son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk; as well as the Regional Party, led by the head of the Tax Administration Mykhailo Azarov; the National Democratic Party, with former Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko as its chairman: and the Agrarian Party of former First Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Hladii.

Another powerful political bloc - to be led by the charismatic and popular Mr. Yuschenko and called the Our Ukraine bloc - will consist of the more nationalistically inclined right-center parties, such as the Reform and Order Party, the National Rukh of Ukraine, the Ukrainian National Rukh, as well as the Liberal Party of Ukraine, recruited to strengthen the Donetsk vote. Political experts believe that former Prime Minister Yuschenko, who has carefully worked to maintain close ties to the presidential administration, should be able to receive some of the government handouts if there are any.

The Democratic Union, led by the powerful business oligarch Oleksander Volkov, believes that like the Social Democrats (United), it can achieve success while going it alone. It should also be able to get a piece of the pie, because of Mr. Volkov's longtime support for the Kuchma Administration and his work as the head of the president's re-election campaign in 1999.

There is also the financially secure Tymoshenko bloc, led by millionaire businesswoman Yulia Tymoshenko, which is the chief opposition force and will undoubtedly have no access to any administrative resources.

One of the central reasons for the problem of administrative influence in these elections lies with the party structure in Ukraine, especially with those political organizations with access to the presidential administration. Most mainstream parties in Ukraine today do not reflect a political ideology or support a specific bloc of voters (other than their own party members). They are organized to support and protect the interests of the very narrow segment of society to which they belong. In most cases the parties are simply lobby groups for business interests or business clans who are united by either their geographic location or type of commerce.

The Razumkov Center report succinctly described the purpose of political parties in Ukraine today, which is also the central problem with the current political system:

"A good portion of political parties are formed and act not in response to a social need or as an institution for forming and pushing the interests of a wider spectrum of society, but simply as an instrument for the political legalization of their clandestine activities and to support the battle between individual groups or individuals who are attempting to grab or to retain power."

The center's director, Mr. Hrytsenko, named the For a United Ukraine political bloc a particular concern because of "the offhand attitude that it holds in the utilization of administrative resources."

He explained that this bloc's need to use all the tools at its disposal, illegal or not, is greater than perhaps for another political structure because it does not have a charismatic leader to compare with ex-Prime Minister Yuschenko of the Our Ukraine bloc who is capable of coalescing its effort and drawing voters. What for a United Ukraine does have is money, members within government and influence.

The way Mr. Medvedchuk was toppled also suggests that politicians and their organizations cannot count on stability and that what seems to be secure at a given moment could rapidly deteriorate. The leader of the Social Democrats (United) looked and sounded confidant of his and his party's abilities and potential after he became the de facto spokesperson for the parliamentary leadership while Chairman Ivan Pliusch lay recuperating from surgery during the last weeks.

But as Mr. Medvedchuk flexed his authority, President Kuchma became disillusioned with the lack of political discipline of one of the politicians with whom he had worked closely, reported to Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, Kyiv's most influential newspaper. And, while the conventional wisdom was that the toppling of the influential first vice-chairman was retribution by political enemies from both sides of the political spectrum for specific political moves by Mr. Medvedchuk, there are those who indicate it could not have happened without the nod of Ukraine's top politician.

Ultimately that, too, was administrative resources at work in its most powerful form.

Ihor Popov, the leader of the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, a civic organization that has been monitoring the Ukrainian vote since 1998 said that in reality, given the current unstable and underdeveloped state of Ukrainian politics and civil society as a whole, there is no reason of any sort to expect that government administrative resources will not influence the March 2002 elections.

"But we can't simply condemn the election results beforehand," explained Mr. Popov. "While it will be difficult to say that they were not tainted, our goal is to try to make them as little tainted as possible."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 23, 2001, No. 51, Vol. LXIX

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