ANALYSIS: Can glasnost policy save Kuchma and his regime? (09/15/02)

ANALYSIS

Can glasnost policy save Kuchma and his regime?

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Newsline

Incumbent Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma faces three insurmountable problems in the 2004 presidential campaign that de facto begins next month and heralds the approach to the post-Kuchma era. (The Constitution of Ukraine precludes him running for a third presidential term).

First, Mr. Kuchma is finding it impossible to arrange a transfer of power to a chosen successor along the lines of that from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin in Russia in 1999-2000. Mr. Kuchma has no oligarch ally who has any public support. Worse still, anybody whom he anointed as his successor would automatically be discredited. Ukrainian polls in the last two years have consistently placed Our Ukraine leader Viktor Yushchenko and Communist Party (CPU) leader Petro Symonenko in the second round of a presidential election with Mr. Yushchenko winning.

Who then will provide President Kuchma with immunity from prosecution and protection for his family's business empire? And who will protect other oligarchs from a bona fide campaign against corruption if Mr. Yushchenko becomes president? Volodymyr Yavorivsky, head of the Writers' Union and Our Ukraine deputy, said he believes this is a life-or-death struggle for those such as the Social Democratic Party-United (SDPU), led by presidential administration head Viktor Medvedchuk, which is accused of being the most corrupt oligarchic clan.

Second, Mr. Kuchma's recent actions suggest that he is no longer indifferent about widespread public hostility to his administration. In a poll released on the 11th anniversary of Ukraine's independence, the Ukrainian Center for Economic and Political Studies (UCEPS) found that 92 percent of Ukrainians feel that they have no influence over the authorities. The same number believe human rights are routinely infringed upon and 80 percent feel their standard of living has worsened since 1990, while 72 percent want the president to resign and 52 percent would support his impeachment.

For the first time ever, four opposition groups - Our Ukraine, the Communists, the Socialists, and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc - are coordinating mass protests scheduled for September 16 calling for early presidential elections, the second anniversary of opposition journalist Heorhii Gongadze's abduction. The UCEPS poll found that 43 percent of Ukrainians supported the protest.

Third, as the opposition has long argued, a serious crisis of power exists in Ukraine and there is very low public trust in state institutions. President Kuchma and his oligarchic allies have little public support and live completely separate lives from the population; there is a lack of public accountability and transparency, and they attempt to stay in power through undemocratic methods.

As oligarch and former presidential adviser Oleksander Volkov pointed out in Den on May 21, the presidency is ideologically amorphous and, therefore, unable to explain to the public what its policies are. One of Kuchma's answers is to reintroduce a Soviet-style policy in accordance with which, beginning this year, his state of the state address to Parliament is studied in all educational institutions.

Mr. Kuchma is accused of changing the outcome of the March parliamentary elections when four opposition groups won 58 percent of the vote, compared to only 18 percent obtained by the SDPU, and For a United Ukraine. Other parties who lost the elections, the Winter Crop Generation party and the Christian Democratic Party, have been promoted by Mr. Kuchma into the presidential administration and together with the SDPU and factions that have grown out of For a United Ukraine continue to run the government. Thus, it is not surprising that 59 percent of Ukrainians, according to the UCEPS do not believe that the March elections were democratic while 51 percent do not believe the forthcoming 2004 elections will be any improvement.

President Kuchma has resorted Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost in a doomed attempt to overcome these three problems and win back public confidence. As Kuchma admitted in an interview in Den on August 2, normal societies have a high level of trust in the authorities. "It is no secret that such trust today is lacking," he admitted. In effect, Mr. Kuchma's policy of glasnost is a tacit admission that pro-presidential groups lost the parliamentary elections.

The "new Kuchma" now expresses concern for his citizens. President Kuchma interrupted his holiday following the Lviv airshow disaster on July 27 that killed 74 people, and he demanded the arrest of military officers "guilty" of that catastrophe. Coal-mine directors deemed guilty of negligence leading to 13 accidents that have killed 187 miners this year alone also are being targeted. Presidential decrees issued on August 1 and 20 outlined new steps to make Ukraine's political system more transparent and reorganized the presidential administration. Although these decrees are portrayed as major steps in political reform, they are no different from three earlier attempts last year that ended up being largely ignored by Ukraine's bureaucrats and the presidentially appointed state administration.

In his Independence Day speech, President Kuchma came out in favor of transforming Ukraine into a parliamentary-presidential republic, a demand that most opposition groups have long supported and pro-presidential blocs in the elections opposed. Mr. Kuchma recently described Parliament as a "center for the country's destabilization." Mr. Kuchma also backed opposition calls for an election law that is fully proportional, something he vetoed five times last year because he claimed society was insufficiently "mature" and parties "inadequately developed."

Mr. Kuchma has successfully created an artificial pro-presidential "parliamentary majority" of 228 through bribery and by blackmailing businessmen who can now appoint a new government and safely introduce his political reforms. Such a policy would sideline the opposition by wooing the "constructive opposition" Our Ukraine from opposition protests and discrediting them in the eyes of the population, while branding the "radical opposition," whom the president already accuses of existing only due to "black funds," as a destabilizing factor and stripping Ms. Tymoshenko of her immunity from prosecution.

Although the aim of this new policy of glasnost is to regain public support, it may also undermine the foundations of the regime built up by President Kuchma since 1994. The new policies are the first signs that Mr. Kuchma is desperately searching for a way out of a predicament that he has himself created as he approaches the end of his term in office.

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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