2002: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Elections: how to win, and then lose

Electoral victory for the political organization called Our Ukraine seemed solid as the 2002 parliamentary elections in Ukraine in 2002 concluded. The new coalition and the successful effort it had produced resulted from the efforts of Ukraine's politically charismatic former prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko. It was the first time the national democratic front stood united going into high political season.

Yet, in the end, political intrigue and legally questionable political maneuvering by pro-presidential forces denied power to the Our Ukraine faction, which, by winning a majority of seats in this newly elected convocation of the Verkhovna Rada ostensibly had the right to form the parliamentary leadership.

The campaign period, which in effect had begun at least six months before January 1, 2002, increased in intensity with the onset of the New Year, which also marked the beginning of a phase of mud-slinging that would continue through the last days of the parliamentary campaign season.

On January 9 Mr. Yushchenko was accused of unethically conspiring with Kyiv Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko to oust National Deputy Viktor Medvedchuk from his seat as second vice-chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. Mr. Medvedchuk was dismissed the same day as an alleged cellphone conversation between the two political leaders took place in which Mr. Omelchenko chastised Mr. Yushchenko for not being present during the vote, but which allegedly also contained information on how they had plotted Mr. Medvedchuk's removal.

During a speech on January 16 Mr. Yushchenko disavowed any inappropriate actions, called the attack a smear campaign and underscored that the point of his campaign was to bring transparent and ethical politics to Ukraine along with the completion of economic reforms.

The first half of the first month of the New Year saw various party congresses choose their party candidate lists and consolidate into political blocs. In addition to Our Ukraine, the For a United Ukraine Bloc, consisting of the nine political parties that support and benefit from the policies of President Leonid Kuchma, announced it had affirmed its political slate. A congress of Women for the Future, which would make a strong showing in polls leading up to election day before fading just before the vote, elected a slate composed of a majority of men.

Other groups deciding on their candidate lists were the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Tymoshenko Bloc, led by the ubiquitous and fiercely anti-Kuchma politician Yulia Tymoshenko, the Social Democratic Party-United (SDPU) and the Progressive Socialist Party of Natalia Vitrenko.

A Razumkov Center poll released on January 12 revealed that only 19.8 percent of Ukrainians believed the upcoming elections would be more "democratic and transparent" than in previous years.

Ukraine's Central Election Commission (CEC) reported on January 30 that 13 political blocs and 23 parties had managed to register for the March 31 elections before the January 29 deadline date. In addition 1,160 individuals had registered to run in separate districts. The registration procedure was the first step in the process to pick the 450 lawmakers to the next Verkhovna Rada. The next official date of importance was February 9 when campaigning was officially allowed.

The new election law, which was finally passed at the end of last year after President Kuchma four times vetoed parliamentary bills he did not agree with, again gave Ukrainians two votes in what is called a mixed electoral system. On March 31, they would first choose from a list of political organizations on the ballot; then they would pick a representative on the ballot from their electoral district.

The composition of the Verkhovna Rada would consist of half the elected lawmakers seated as individual winners from the 225 electoral districts in Ukraine, while the other 225 votes would be apportioned from among the various political parties based on the percentage of the electoral vote that supported them. The key to the proportional by-party voting was that a political organization needed to get at least 4 percent electoral support to obtain any seats.

Widespread allegations that government and state officials were intruding into the campaign process by utilizing the materials at their official disposal - whether financial, manpower or otherwise - raised fears among the anti-Kuchma forces, particularly Our Ukraine and the Tymoshenko bloc, that the elections threatened to become a campaign of intimidation tactics and voter manipulation that would not allow for a democratic outcome.

To make its own viewpoint on the matter known, the U.S. sent Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky on a visit to Kyiv on February 5-6 to assess the election situation and to emphasize their significance in Washington's eyes. She acknowledged that in meetings with political leaders, representatives of the press and civic organizations monitoring the elections she had heard of campaign violations and what she termed "aberrations." She underscored, however, that it was far too early to condemn the elections and called on state and government leaders to allow for free and open elections.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Javier Solana, the foreign affairs secretary of the European Union, echoed similar thoughts during their visits in the weeks that followed.

Nevertheless, pre-election maneuvering continued, most notably on February 11 when President Kuchma ordered Kyiv Mayor Omelchenko to resign as the head of the state administration for the city of Kyiv with the explanation that all government officials running for the Parliament must step down. Most of Mr. Kuchma's detractors, however, saw it simply as a politically motivated move to counter efforts by Mr. Omelchenko to form a strong Yednist Bloc, which he said would cooperate with Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine. Those same presidential critics said that people close to the president had not been given the same walking papers.

After a series of meetings with the president Mr. Omelchenko was returned to his post as representative to the state government. Coincidentally or not, he remained off the political radar screen for the rest of the campaign period.

On March 4 Mr. Yushchenko said during a press conference, after a just-completed swing through the eastern and central oblasts of Ukraine, that local and regional government leaders were impeding his efforts to get his message to the voters. Two days later, in the southeastern city of Berdiansk, he said that many local officials had simply and overtly become campaign workers for the pro-presidential candidates. The allegations included refusal by local and regional officials to allow public buildings to be used for public rallies and denial of broadcast time for interviews and paid political announcements on local and regional television stations.

On March 11, less than three weeks before Election Day, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe filed a breach of election law complaint with Ukraine's CEC, charging the government's main television station with giving advertising access exclusively to the pro-presidential For a United Ukraine Bloc. Adrian Severin of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly warned state and government leaders that his organization had "heard serious allegations and had legitimate concerns about whether the March 31 elections to Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada would be free and fair."

Other international election monitoring organizations, including the Helsinki Commission, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute issued similar appraisals.

When the final pre-election political surveys were released on March 14 - two weeks before Election Day, as allowed by law - Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine nonetheless continued to gather steam and move ahead of its nearest competitor, the Communist Party.

A Razumkov Center study showed that 23.9 percent of the 2,010 respondents it questioned supported Our Ukraine. The Communists had the support of 16.8 percent of those questioned, while For a United Ukraine had a mere 7 percent support, according to the survey.

A week before the elections, with intense international pressure on Ukraine, including resolutions by both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate on March 20 and March 21, respectively, calling for free and fair elections, several leading elements within Ukraine's political establishment lashed out at what they considered undue and illegal foreign influence over Ukraine's internal matters.

President Kuchma described the U.S. congressional resolutions as "unprecedented." But he showed little displeasure with comments and suggestions made by Russia's Ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had not shied away from commenting on the election on several occasions. The envoy also decided that he had a right to criticize the U.S. congressional resolutions.

At one point Mr. Chernomyrdin had said that the political structure of the Our Ukraine Bloc "worried us," which led the Russian newspaper Segodnia to call the Russian ambassador "the biggest expert on the elections."

In a final exclamation point to a very controversial and dirty campaign period, a candidate from an electoral district just outside the city of Ivano-Frankivsk was found shot to death less than two days before the elections in what law enforcement officials termed a "political assassination."

Late on March 29 an unidentified assailant shot Mykola Shkribliak, a candidate from the SDPU. Attempts were made to link his opponent, National Deputy Roman Zvarych - a member of the Our Ukraine bloc and a former U.S. citizen - who was leading in the polls, to the murder, but no strong causal relationships were ever established and the incumbent never became a serious suspect in the case. The killers of Mr. Shkribliak have yet to be found.

Two days later, nearly 65 percent of Ukrainians - less than usual for Ukraine, but much higher than by Western standards - turned out for the controversial elections. Voters gave Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine a resounding victory in the parliamentary elections with 23.6 percent of them supporting the national democratic political force.

The Communist Party came next with 20 percent, followed by For a United Ukraine with 11.8 percent and the Tymoshenko Bloc with 7.24 percent.

The other political groups to break the 4 percent barrier needed by law to gain seats in the Parliament were the Socialist Party, with an unexpectedly high 6.88 percent, and the SDPU with a very surprisingly anemic 6.27 percent of the electoral vote.

The Green Party, the Democratic Union, the Yabluko Party and the Yednist Party failed to make it past the mark. Both the Green Party, which ironically had always been aligned with pro-presidential forces, and the Yabluko Party claimed vote-counting fraud as a reason for their defeat.

Also notable was the election of Ukrainian National Assembly leader Andrii Shkil to the Verkhovna Rada as part of the Tymoshenko Bloc. Mr. Shkil had spent more than a year in jail on unsubstantiated charges that he had led the uprising that led to the March 9 confrontation with law enforcement officials before the Presidential Administration Building. He was freed from jail because as an elected lawmaker he now had immunity from criminal prosecution.

Observer groups from both the United States and Europe graded the third elections to the Verkhovna Rada as free, but not altogether fair. Domestic observers also reported widespread accusations of voter intimidation, lack of access to the media for some candidates and the use of government resources to support favored candidates.

The U.S. State Department emphasized that "important flaws persist."

Among the very few positive conclusions was one noted by the State Department that, in general, these elections were an improvement over past polls; the other was that Election Day itself went much more smoothly than in past years.

In the first days after the election, Our Ukraine felt comfortable that it would claim a minimum of 112 seats, which it believed would give it sufficient weight to lead a parliamentary majority. Within a week, however, it became apparent that the bloc had erred seriously in not recruiting independents to its side and, even more importantly, that it had not pressed for credible assurances of support from winners in the single-mandate districts. On April 9, President Kuchma's chief of staff, who had led the For a United Ukraine bloc, announced that he had obtained commitments from 145 of the country's 225 single-mandate representatives to join his pro-presidential faction in the Verkhovna Rada. That number added to the 35 seats his bloc had taken with its 12 percent of the electoral vote would give it a whopping 180 seats - just 45 seats short of a majority.

Our Ukraine initially said little about the sudden turn of events. However, one respected political scientist, Volodymyr Polokhalo, could not remain silent. He called the underhanded way in which For a United Ukraine had cajoled and threatened lawmakers to come over to its side, "a slap in the face of the electorate, which voted very differently from the way in which power is developing in the Verkhovna Rada."

At first, Our Ukraine remained optimistic that it could find a middle ground with some of the political parties within Mr. Lytvyn's mega-faction and draw them over. But soon - and too late - they, too, began crying foul play.

In the end, Mr. Lytvyn became the new chairman of Parliament and the SDPU, which had the poorest results of the political groups that had surpassed the 4 percent threshold, had become part of the new pro-presidential coalition, while also obtaining a seat on the parliamentary presidium.

When a pro-presidential parliamentary majority became reality a few months later, the electoral mandate that Mr. Yushchenko and Our Ukraine had achieved became no more than a footnote for the history books.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 12, 2003, No. 2, Vol. LXXI

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