ANALYSIS

Ukraine's approaching elections and the fractured multi-party system

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Newsline

Ukraine's new election law, which finally came into force on November 2, 2001, preserves the 50:50 split in how deputies are to be elected that was used during the March 1998 elections, even though President Leonid Kuchma had expressed concern that not only well-known reformist parties, but also Ukraine's largest party, the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), would gain from the retention of proportional lists.

Between the 1994 elections, held exclusively on the majoritarian principle, and the 1998 majoritarian-proportional elections, the number of CPU deputies increased by 50 percent, from 80 to nearly 120. If the new election law had required that 75 percent of deputies be elected according to proportional voting, as established parties such like the CPU had pushed for, the number of Communist deputies would have risen again in the next Parliament.

Ukraine's first political party was the Ukrainian Republican Party, created in April 1990 as an outgrowth of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, itself a descendant from the Soviet-era Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG). Since 1990, 129 more parties have been registered in Ukraine - a reflection not of the progress of democratization, but of a badly fractured and manipulated political system.

The parliamentary newspaper Holos Ukraiiny recently wrote: "The current regime controls the course of political events and is therefore preventing the different opposition parties from uniting."

Ukraine's multiparty system includes an eclectic array, ranging from three rural parties, seven promoting peace and unity, five that aim to defend women's interests, four youth parties, and 21 championing narrow special interests (cars, pensioners, educators, industrialists, health, private property, regions, social justice, the sea, consumers, NGOs, private property, the third millennium, liberty, and small and medium businesses, among others).

The center has been completely dominated by the "oligarchs," as seen by the recent absorption of the Inter-Regional Bloc of Reforms by the National Democratic Party of Ukraine (NDPU). These parties of oligarchs control six parties: Labor Ukraine, the NDPU, Agrarians, United Social Democrats, Democratic Party and the Democratic Union. Obviously, their names have little to do with their real party objectives.

What remains of the centrists includes three liberal and four other minuscule parties, while the center-left is divided among eight parties, the majority of whom are "social democratic" to varying degrees.

The Greens, meanwhile, are divided among eight parties that include every imaginable combination of "ecology" or "green" in their names.

On the center-right, Ukraine's party system has three Rukhs and 14 other center-right parties espousing "patriotic" or "fatherland" interests, as well as seven Christian Democratic parties and one Muslim party. The extreme right has five parties, three of which have illegal paramilitary formations.

The Russophile-pan-Slavic wing is badly divided among nine quarrelling, small parties, while the extreme left, their natural allies, have 10 parties, five of which include "Communist" in their titles.

Ukraine's older law on political parties was updated and came into force on April 5, 2001. Surprisingly, it does not stipulate any minimum number of members for a party to be registered. By not imposing any restrictions on the registration of parties, no matter how small or ineffectual they are, the executive ensures that Ukraine's nascent democracy remains weak and disparate.

When submitting registration documents, parties do have to collect 10,000 signatures from those eligible to vote - but that is not a difficult task. To prevent the rise of regional and secessionist parties, these signatures have to be collected in two-thirds of Ukraine's oblasts, the cities of Kyiv and Sevastopol (which have all-republican status), and the districts of Crimea. The aim of the law is to create parties that supposedly have an all-Ukrainian status, yet the law fails to ensure this as none of the 130 parties in Ukraine has an all-Ukrainian profile.

Another aspect of the law that is ineffective is its failure to enforce restrictions on the formation and operation of parties (Article 5). Parties are to be prohibited if their programs or activities aim to liquidate Ukrainian independence, forcefully change the Constitution of Ukraine or undermine national security, encroach on human rights, maintain paramilitary formations, or if they violate Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Yet each one of these prohibitions has been violated by one party or another.

The CPU, together with small Russophile, pan-Slavic parties want to liquidate Ukrainian independence. Recently, President Kuchma branded the CPU as "anti-Ukrainian" because it uses the symbols of a non-existent state - the USSR. He added that, therefore, he cannot, understand why the CPU is allowed into Parliament.

In reality, Mr. Kuchma would prefer to have the CPU legally registered, as it has proved to be a convenient scapegoat both for the socioeconomic crisis (its deputies dominated the Parliament until 2000 and have stalled reforms) and during the "Kuchmagate" crisis when CPU deputies allied with the oligarchs against the reformist government of Viktor Yuschenko.

Only one party has ever been temporarily banned in Ukraine: the extreme right Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), after its members took part in Kyiv riots during the funeral of Patriarch Volodymyr Romaniuk of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarch in July 1995. But this ban was revoked after two years and the party was re-registered. Although its leaders were arrested after the March 9 anti-Kuchma riots and remain in prison, the UNA is still legal.

Paramilitary formations are usually registered as innocuous sports or cultural civic organizations - not parties. The UNA has always had a paramilitary formation, the Ukrainian National Self-Defense Organization (UNSO), which has been involved in fighting or political violence in Abkhazia, Moldova, Chechnya and Belarus.

The Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists also has its Stepan Bandera Sports-Political Association Tryzub, which is reportedly under the control of the local authorities in western Ukraine and, therefore, is not likely to be banned. Pro-Kuchma Tryzub members from Ternopil were the real instigators of the March 9 violence in Kyiv, for which the anti-Kuchma UNA-UNSO were made the scapegoats; no Tryzub members were arrested for their actions. In addition, there is the Union of Soviet Officers, whose pensioner members the Security Service of Ukraine earlier this year accused of planning a coup d'état. Ukrainian and Russophile Kozak groups also exist.

The law on political parties has never been invoked to ban separatist parties in Crimea. Nevertheless, the law has forced them to re-register as all-Ukrainian parties (e.g., the Crimean Russian Bloc became the Soyuz [Union] Party). Other Crimean parties who represented the local Party of Power were absorbed into all-Ukrainian oligarch parties.

Ukraine's many political parties play little or no role in politics and have a minuscule influence on public life - a state of affairs that the executive is only too happy to allow to continue. "Kuchmagate" has nonetheless been instrumental in creating three groupings that will go into the next elections as the anti-statehood left: the pro-Kuchma oligarch-dominated center, and the anti-Kuchma patriotic center-left and center-right. Meanwhile, Mr. Yuschenko's Our Ukraine bloc hopes to successfully occupy the middle ground between the pro- and anti-Kuchma camps, presenting itself as a patriotic, anti-oligarch, pro-Kuchma formation.

Taras Kuzio is a research associate at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 6, 2002, No. 1, Vol. LXX

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