Central Election Commission reports registration of 23 parties, 13 political blocs (02/03/02)

Central Election Commission reports registration of 23 parties, 13 political blocs

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's Central Election Commission reported that 13 political blocs and 23 parties had managed to register for elections to the Verkhovna Rada and to submit their candidate lists before the January 29 deadline stipulated by Ukrainian law. The CEC is still considering 14 applications, some of which were resubmitted under appeal after initial problems.

And while officially the campaign season will only begin on February 9, dirty tricks and mudslinging have already marred another Ukrainian election and set the tone for this year.

The registration procedure is the first major step in the process to pick 450 national deputies to Ukraine's Parliament in elections that are scheduled for March 31. The process was greatly simplified in a new law passed late last year, which no longer requires a candidate to gather voters' signatures.

Candidates are required to pay a registration fee to run for a parliamentary seat - 1,020 hrv, or about $200, per candidate in the single mandate districts; while a political party or bloc must pay 225,000 hrv, or $43,000 to put up its slate.

The new law also stipulates that lawmakers are elected in a mixed system, with half the 450 parliamentary seats awarded to political organizations that attain at least 4 percent voter support and the other 50 percent awarded to individuals who take a majority of votes in each of the 225 single-mandate electoral districts of Ukraine

The CEC said on January 30 that 2,765 individuals had registered as candidates from party slates, while another 1,160 hopefuls had filed in single-mandate districts, which works out to an average of 12 candidates per Verkhovna Rada seat.

All the candidates will have to deal with the fact that the campaign season will be hot and controversial, and that many contests will be fierce and some run unethically. With the official onset of actual campaigning still days away, maneuvering for political advantage by using smear tactics in an attempt to discredit the competition already has been well-established.

The main target thus far has been Viktor Yuschenko, the ex-prime minister and former head of the National Bank of Ukraine, who heads the political bloc called Our Ukraine. The political bloc includes most of the mainstream national democratic parties, including both Rukhs and the Reforms and Order Party, in addition to the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Liberal Party.

Most polls show Our Ukraine comfortably ahead in the run-up to the parliamentary elections with some 17 percent support (the latest Democratic Initiative poll gave the bloc as much as 21 percent), about two percentage points up on the Communist Party, which has historically led the Ukrainian vote for Parliament.

In the latest strategy directed against the Our Ukraine Bloc, the For One Family Party, headed by National Deputy Oleksander Rzhavskyi, announced during its convention on January 15 that it had changed its name to the For Yuschenko Bloc and would include Mr. Yuschenko in its candidate list. Mr. Yuschenko vehemently protested the action and said he would file suit against the political organization.

"Dirty political tactics are used more and more often in our times," Mr. Yuschenko said on January 25, announcing that he had filed an appeal in court to stop the use of his name. Mr. Yuschenko called the move by Mr. Rzhavskyi's political group, which includes at least one prominent politician from a pro-Russian organization, "a type of political assassination and an attempt to earn political dividends from the name of the bloc."

Mr. Rzhavskyi, whose party had unsuccessfully attempted to become part of the For Ukraine bloc, said he would proceed with the use of the Yuschenko name nonetheless, according to Interfax-Ukraine, primarily because there is an Oleksander Yuschenko on the slate. However, the CEC said on January 30 that it still was not certain that it would register the bloc for the elections.

This was the second attempt by a political force to discredit Mr. Yuschenko. Earlier, Dmytro Ponomarchuk, an organizer of the National Rukh For Unity Bloc, whose membership includes many who had broken with the National Rukh of Ukraine Party after it joined the Our Ukraine Bloc, announced at a press conference on January 9 that he had in his possession a taped telephone conversation between Mr. Yuschenko and Unity Party leader and Kyiv Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko, which allegedly proved that the two conspired to successfully oust Parliament Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk. Mr. Ponomarchuk asserted that the tapes are evidence that Mr. Yuschenko is not as clean and honest as he portrays himself to be.

Mr. Ponomarchuk, the longtime press secretary to the late Rukh founder and leader Vyacheslav Chornovil, said at the time that he would not identify who gave him the recordings. The taped conversations were subsequently confiscated by Ukraine's intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, as it began a criminal investigation, and Mr. Ponomarchuk was ousted from the political bloc he helped organize.

Judicial authorities also have come under fire recently for influencing the electoral process. On January 29 a Ukrainian Appeals Court rescinded a ruling by a Kyiv District Court in which criminal money-laundering charges against former Vice Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko had been dropped. The Appeals Court said the lower court had exceeded its jurisdiction.

Ms. Tymoshenko is the leader of a political bloc named after her, which includes many of the political organizations that staunchly oppose President Leonid Kuchma and led anti-Kuchma demonstrations on the streets of Kyiv in the spring, among them: her own Batkivschyna Party, Stepan Khmara's Republican Conservative Party, Levko Lukianenko's Republican Party and Anatolii Matvienko's Sobor Party. The latest polls have the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc at around 3.5 percent voter support, somewhat shy of the 4 percent needed to obtain seats in the next Parliament.

The Appeals Court ruling reinstated a ban imposed by the Procurator General's Office barring Ms. Tymoshenko from leaving Kyiv, effectively limiting the charismatic oppositionist leader's campaigning to the capital city.

Oleksander Turchynov, leader of the Batkivschyna Party's parliamentary faction, said during a press conference on September 29 that the ruling against Ms. Tymoshenko is illegal and unethical because no one was present to offer her defense. He explained that a court generally excuses defendants from appearing twice before handing down verdicts in their absence.

Ms. Tymoshenko failed to show for the court proceeding because she was involved in a serious automobile accident on her way to the courthouse. She is expected to be hospitalized for at least two weeks for treatment of a concussion, possible vertebral damage and a chest contusion.

"The court made a cynical, even immoral decision today," explained Mr. Turchynov. "The court, which is controlled by the president, in effect damaged Yulia Tymoshenko's election strategy and her ability to campaign."

While Mr. Turchynov would not rule out that the accident was staged, Yuri Kostenko, leader of the Ukrainian National Rukh Party and a member of the Our Ukraine bloc said it was "the transition of the electoral process to the extreme stage."

"It is difficult for me to comment on the reasons for the crash," explained Mr. Kostenko. "But everyone in Ukraine who has heard about this event - I am 100 percent sure about this - sees it not just as a simple road accident."

Meanwhile the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), a respected civic organization that has monitored elections in Ukraine since 1994 and receives much of its financing from international foundations and organizations that support the development of democratic processes, also felt the effects of a Ukrainian election season that is heating up considerably.

The CVU issued a statement on January 30 in response to an editorial commentary broadcast by the government station UT-1, which questioned whether the use of international funding from the National Democratic Institute, an arm of the U.S. Democratic Party, renders the CVU unable to remain objective in its election monitoring. It also queried whether the use of international funds was an illegal intrusion by the NDI into Ukraine's electoral process.

The CVU responded that the editorial piece, which was broadcast on January 23, was part of a concerted effort "to discredit non-governmental organizations in Ukraine, with the aim of lowering the trust in them in the run-up to elections of Ukrainian parliamentarians." It did not identify who was attempting to do the discrediting.

Since September the NDI has sponsored weekly monitoring of elections in Ukraine by the CVU in which thousands of CVU workers in all the country's regions report on questionable practices by government officials, election workers, political parties and candidates. The CVU's research has found that the use of government resources will be extensive in the spring elections and could be decisive in many campaigns.

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