Turning the pages back...

March 15, 1998

Four years ago, just two weeks before the parliamentary elections of 1998, The Weekly published an editorial commenting on what it called a "high-stakes election." Following are excerpts.

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If politics can be likened to a game of chance, the game being played in Ukraine today is poker. It is not a penny ante, neighborhood game among friends. The stakes are high: Ukraine's future political direction.

There are 30 political parties at the table. The one holding the best cards is the Communist Party, generally believed to have assured itself of anywhere from 11 to 17 percent of the vote, depending on what poll one believes. It is by far the largest electoral support for any single political party.

Rukh, which had been a strong player early on - at one time with double digit support among voters in some polls - has seen its percentages dwindle to about five.

The Green Party of Ukraine, on the other hand, has come on surprisingly strong, thanks to a steady and effective stream of television advertising.

The political center has a good broad-based foundation of support among the electorate, but it is divided among almost a score of parties, most of which will be able to garner at most a percentage point or two of voter support on March 29.

However, what will probably mark this election season in history (if it's not the landslide victory of the political left, which is still a real possibility) will be the scale of political mudslinging, fighting and backstabbing. ...

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Green Miller, speaking in Washington recently, said the election season has produced "an enormous amount of recriminations, threats of exposures of corruption ... a messy campaign." But Mr. Miller also said that "it is a very healthy, democratic campaign."

... only time will tell whether the elections will turn out to be truly democratic. International election observers who are now arriving in Ukraine will tell us more about that after March 29. ... We would actually like to think that these will be the elections that remove the old guard from power. But even a diehard gambler wouldn't take that bet.

We also hope that Ukraine's electorate will understand that it alone is responsible for making the political changes needed to set Ukraine firmly on the track toward becoming a law-abiding democratic state. Sadly, polls show that one-third of Ukrainians have not decided whether they will vote or have decided it is not worth the effort. ...

Source: "High-stakes elections" (editorial), The Ukrainian Weekly, March 15, 1998, Vol. LXVI, No. 11.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 10, 2002, No. 10, Vol. LXX

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