ANALYSIS: Election campaign starts in Ukraine (01/27/02)

ANALYSIS

Election campaign starts in Ukraine

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Newsline

On March 31, Ukraine will elect a new Parliament. The outcome of that ballot will determine the country's domestic and foreign orientation for the first decade of the 21st century. How the elections are conducted will determine whether Ukraine's international image improves following the murder of journalist Heorhii Gongadze in the fall of 2000 and the ensuing "Kuchmagate" scandal.

Ukraine's revised parliamentary election law came into force on October 30, 2001, and the 90-day election campaign officially began on January 1 of this year. Ukrainian voters have a six-cornered choice between two pro-presidential blocs (For a United Ukraine and the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine [United]); two anti-presidential blocs (the Socialists and the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc); one that bridges these two hostile camps and is anti-oligarch but is not hostile to President Leonid Kuchma (Our Ukraine); and one that rejects just about every aspect of the present political system and Ukraine's independence (the Communists).

The hard-line Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) will more than likely again garner its steady 15 to 20 percent of the vote, mostly from pensioners, according to two December polls by SOCIS and Democratic Initiatives. That party's main support base is in the industrialized Russified and sovietized regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

The Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU), once an ally of the CPU, took part in the 1998 elections with the now-defunct Agrarian Party. Agrarian Party Chairman Oleksander Tkachenko, who served briefly as Verkhovna Rada Chairman in 1998-1999 until the "velvet revolution" in early 2000 that removed the Rada's left-wing leadership, has now returned to the CPU. Throughout the 1990s, the SPU moved cautiously to the right to position itself on the left of the Social Democrats and toward a pro- statehood position. This move was reinforced by the key role played by SPU Chairman Oleksander Moroz during the Kuchmagate affair that erupted in November 2000. The SPU's allies will be four small parties representing rural interests, dissident Greens, the former Soviet-era Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine and Social Democrats.

The SPU's main base of support is in the Ukrainophone regions of western and central Ukraine outside of Galicia. Mykola Melnychenko, the former officer of the Security Service of Ukraine at the heart of Kuchmagate who is now in exile in the United States is running on the SPU list.

Mr. Moroz's SPU is tactically allied with the former Forum for National Salvation (FNS) created in February 2001 at the height of Kuchmagate because both blocs support moves to radically reform Ukraine's political system, including abolishing the presidency and impeaching President Kuchma.

The FNS has been renamed the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc to capitalize on the vice prime minister's popularity as a female politician and most voters' preference for personalities rather than blocs or parties. The Tymoshenko bloc includes her own Fatherland Party, two center-left parties (the Social Democrats and the Patriotic Party), and four national democratic parties (Sobor, the Republicans, the Conservative Republicans and the Christian Democrats).

The SDPU, which is headed by former first vice-chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Viktor Medvedchuk, has long considered former Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko its main opponent, and he has reciprocal feelings. Both the SDPU and Mr. Yuschenko's Our Ukraine have their main base of support in western-central Ukraine. It should be recalled that Mr. Medvedchuk orchestrated the April 26, 2001, no-confidence vote in the Yuschenko government. In the 1998 elections, the SDPU managed to gain seats in the Rada only because the party's result was "topped" up by votes from the Agrarians to push it over the threshold to the suspiciously close 4.01 percent. While Mr. Medvedchuk has attempted to use the language card to obtain eastern Ukrainian votes, he has also sought to increase his profile among western Ukrainians by openly talking of the 1944 arrest of his father, on charges of being a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). His father who was then deported to Siberia, where Mr. Medvedchuk was born.

The loss of support from the executive for the SDPU, as reflected in Mr. Medvedchuk's ouster on December 13, 2001, from the post of vice-chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, means that the party will not have access to "administrative resources" during the campaign. It is also not coincidental that the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting, headed by former Rukh Chairman Ivan Drach, withdrew the license from Inter television - which is controlled by the SDPU and is highly popular in eastern Ukraine where the rival pro-Kuchma For a United Ukraine has its main support base - on the same day that Mr. Medvedchuk was removed as Rada vice-chairman.

The SDPU leadership must be wondering if they will suffer the same fate as former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko's Hromada, which was destroyed in 1998-1999 after he quarreled with the executive. SDPU votes may be needed by For a United Ukraine bloc to counter Mr. Yuschenko's popularity.

Successive opinion polls conducted since summer 2001 show Mr. Yuschenko's popularity rating at 30 percent, a figure far higher than any other politician in Ukraine and that of Our Ukraine at 15 to 20 percent, according to the same two polls. The popularity of his bloc is only low in south-eastern Ukraine (2 to 5 percent) and Crimea (1 percent). This means that for the first time in Ukraine's history, the CPU is not the most popular party. The "Yushchenko phenomenon" makes it likely that the CPU will attract only hard-core supporters, while those who formerly voted for the Communists as a sign of protest against the status quo this time will vote for Our Ukraine, Ms. Tymoshenko or the SPU. Mr. Yuschenko's bloc includes his longtime national democratic allies from the two main wings of Rukh; Reform and Order, led by old-time colleague Viktor Pynzenyk; the Liberals (the former Donbas Party of Power); the "mini-oligarch" Solidarity party, whose leader Petro Poroshenko heads the bloc's headquarters; and other smaller Christian and national democratic parties.

Mr. Yuschenko has attempted to bridge the pro- and anti-Kuchma camps by making clear his opposition to the oligarchs but not to President Kuchma personally. This however, has not prevented Mr. Kuchma from openly accusing Mr. Yuschenko earlier this month of being behind "Kuchmagate." Mr. Yuschenko is the godfather of Mr. Poroshenko's daughters and has been criticized by Ms. Tymoshenko for including both him and Roman Besmertnyi, President Kuchma's representative in the Verkhovna Rada and a former member of the pro-Kuchma National Democratic Party of Ukraine (NDP), on his campaign team. Mr. Kuchma is also utilizing the recently formed anti- Yuschenko Rukh for Unity led by Bohdan Boiko to draw away some Rukh supporters from Our Ukraine.

For a United Ukraine is Mr. Kuchma's open favorite and the nucleus of Ukraine's future presidential party. At a meeting with the regional media on December 18, 2001, President Kuchma openly admitted having instructed all levels of the state, from the heads of village councils to the prime minister, to vote for that bloc. During his two-hour meeting he never once mentioned Mr. Medvedchuk or the SDPU.

The five parties belonging to the bloc (NDP, Agrarians, Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Party of Regions and Labor Ukraine) seemed earlier this fall in danger of falling apart, a factor that led Mr. Kuchma to delegate Volodymyr Lytvyn, head of the presidential administration, to lead the bloc. Prime Minister Anatolii Kinakh is second on the list of top names of For a United Ukraine. Mr. Lytvyn sees the main supporters of his bloc as voters tied to the authorities and pro-presidential supporters.

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

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