ANALYSIS: Is the president of Ukraine sincere about political reform? (09/15/02)

ANALYSIS

Is the president of Ukraine sincere about political reform?

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

President Kuchma used the anniversary of the declaration of Ukrainian independence on August 24 to announce his support for political reforms. How genuine was he?

Mr. Kuchma has always supported a presidential system modeled on Russia's and has opposed a law on proportional elections. The highly flawed April 2000 referendum aimed to transform Ukraine into a presidential republic and create a smaller, bicameral, puppet parliament. Last year, Mr. Kuchma vetoed a law on fully proportional elections five times.

President Kuchma announced his intention to launch political reforms because the opposition plans to hold mass demonstrations on September 16, with Our Ukraine holding a forum of democratic forces the day before. Worse still for Mr. Kuchma, and a sign of the rising public hostility to his regime, is the decision by the moderate business group Razom - the "pragmatic" and "constructive opposition" within Our Ukraine - to support a referendum on early presidential elections. (The speed with which events are moving can be seen in the fact that a failed referendum drive by Yulia Tymoshenko in spring 2001 was not then backed by Our Ukraine.) Mr. Yushchenko also wrote his most critical open letter to date to President Kuchma on August 29.

Mr. Kuchma's representative in parliament, Oleksander Zadorozhnyy, admitted two reasons for Kuchma's new policies in an interview in the August 31-September 7 issue of the Dzerkalo Tyzhnia weekly. First, "[Kuchma] was forced to move to this [supporting political reform] because opposition forces in parliament had adopted as their program the movement toward a parliamentary-presidential republic," Mr. Zadorozhnyi said.

Second, Kuchma had an eye to the 2004 parliamentary elections. Mr. Zadorozhnyy argued that Ukraine has no individual to whom the extensive range of powers that Kuchma enjoys today could be transferred, i.e., neither to an oligarch nor to Yushchenko. "That is why these powers require serious modification," he said.

A move toward a parliamentary-presidential republic would reduce the power of the next elected president, which, as polls consistently show, would be Mr. Yushchenko. If the Constitution is changed by the next presidential elections, the Parliament, which has a pro-presidential majority, would elect the next president by a majority vote, a system in place in Estonia and Moldova. This would resolve the problem of a pro-Kuchma presidential candidate not being subjected to a popular vote and would deal with the lack of any popular oligarch who could be elected by popular vote as a successor to President Kuchma and would give Mr. Kuchma immunity from prosecution after his retirement. The pro-presidential parliamentary majority would simply elect one of its own to replace Mr. Kuchma.

In Ukraine, the pro-presidential blocs fought the elections in support of a presidential system and the implementation of the April 2000 constitutional referendum. This has now been dropped and changed five months after the elections when the executive ordered them to support a parliamentary-presidential system. Lacking any ideology and objectives other than maintaining power, centrist oligarchic parties can very easily change their programs.

Of Ukraine's virtual, centrist oligarchic parties, only the Kyiv oligarchic clan has attempted to create a functioning party, the Social Democratic Party-united (SDPU) led by Viktor Medvedchuk, who now heads the presidential administration. The SDPU is de facto becoming the new "party of power" and heads of raion administrations are being replaced by SDPU loyalists. The National Democratic Party (NDP) failed to fulfill this role after the 1998 elections, and For a United Ukraine disintegrated almost immediately after the March 2002 elections.

Our Ukraine leader Mr. Yushchenko claims that Mr. Medvedchuk has become Ukraine's "Rasputin." The SDPU has openly bragged that it is behind Mr. Kuchma's political reforms, working behind the scenes. Mr. Medvedchuk is reputed to be the most intelligent and "ruthless" (i.e., in Mr. Kuchma's view, the most efficient) among Ukraine's oligarchs, especially in comparison to the weakness shown by former presidential administration and For a United Ukraine head Volodymyr Lytvyn. Messrs. Medvedchuk and Kuchma have a major factor in common: They both hate Mr. Kuchma's enemies, especially Mr. Yushchenko.

The SDPU is the only oligarch party that has always supported a fully proportional election law. Mr. Medvedchuk - the leader of the SDPU, which was the last of the parties that made it through the four percent threshold in the March elections when it won only 6.27 percent of the vote - is behind the attempt at tampering with the election results in the Parliament by creating what Mr. Yushchenko calls an "artificial administrative [pro-presidential] majority."

The nine factions from the former For a United Ukraine and the SDPU that have created this majority are unlikely to obtain agreement from Our Ukraine to join it because this would contradict Mr. Yushchenko's long-held argument that a "democratic majority" can only be built around his bloc, which won the elections. In addition, Mr. Yushchenko has ruled out joining a majority "created by the SDPU."

Regardless of the truth behind Mr. Yushchenko's arguments, they have no resonance with centrist political forces steeped in Soviet political culture. Such a political culture defines those in opposition as illegitimate, i.e., "destructive forces"; attempts to co-opt political groups, trade unions and non-governmental organizations to help "consolidate society"; and still uses the security service to collect information on the opposition in the same manner as the Soviet KGB. Such views prefer an authoritarian, corporatist state and have little to do with a liberal democracy.

In January 1999, 237 parliamentary deputies voted in favor of abolishing the presidency, a reflection of how the presidency had already by then been discredited by President Kuchma. Mr. Kuchma's political reforms aim not to replicate this move from three years ago but to consolidate the former Soviet Ukrainian nomenklatura as the country's ruling elite and to marginalize the opposition by ensuring that a safe successor is elected from among the pro-presidential parliamentary majority.

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies and adjunct staff member of the department of political science, University of Toronto.

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