ANALYSIS: Verkhovna Rada moves proportional election law (03/14/04)

ANALYSIS

Verkhovna Rada moves proportional election law

by Jan Maksymiuk
RFE/RL Belarus and Ukraine Report

The Verkhovna Rada voted 262-7 on March 5 to adopt in its first reading a bill postulating a fully proportional party-list system for parliamentary elections. The document - referred to in the Ukrainian media as the Rudkovskyi-Kliuchkovskyi bill after the names of its main authors, Mykola Rudkovskyi of the Socialist Party and Yurii Kliuchkovskyi from Our Ukraine - calls for the election of 450 lawmakers in 225 constituencies from the lists of those parties and blocs that win at least 3 percent of the national vote, instead of the existing 4 percent voting threshold.

The adoption of a purely proportional system is a sine qua non for the Communist Party and the Socialist Party to support constitutional reforms that are being promoted by the presidential administration.

It is noteworthy that essentially the same bill was put to a vote in the Verkhovna Rada in February 2003, when it was supported by 217 deputies (nine votes shy of the required majority for approval) from Our Ukraine, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and the Social Democratic Party-United, that is, from the parties that easily cleared the 4 percent voting threshold in the March 2002 parliamentary ballot in the nationwide constituency, in which 225 parliamentary mandates were contested under a proportional party-list system.

This time, Our Ukraine and the Tymoshenko Bloc did not take part in the vote. Even one of the authors of the bill, Our Ukraine's Mr. Kliuchkovskyi, did not support it.

Our Ukraine leader Viktor Yushchenko explained that his bloc - which won more than 100 parliamentary seats in 2002, primarily owing to a proportional election system applied to the half of the contested mandates - did not participate in the vote because it cannot accept the lowering of a threshold for parties and blocs to make it into the Verkhovna Rada.

"The issue of the threshold is of principal importance," Mr. Yushchenko said. According to him, the vote on the proportional election law was a "ticket to a coup" that will eventually lead - through the subsequent adoption of a constitutional reform bill - to the installation of an "emperor" in the post of prime minister. Yushchenko also argued that lowering the voting threshold will fragment the legislature even further than it is now, thus making it very problematic to form a viable pro-government coalition consisting of six to eight factions.

Ms. Tymoshenko said her bloc refused to support the proportional election bill for reasons of principal. "The law on the proportional election [system] that was adopted today [March 5] is a banal bribe that was offered to opposition forces to ensure their support for the anticonstitutional mutiny," she charged. "I am stating that we have never accepted bribes and will never vote for laws that are democratic by name but in essence do not leave a stone standing in the people's power. The law on the proportional election [system] gives power to the clans .... Pretending to be witty and worrying about election innovations while the independent press is being destroyed in this country is the same as worrying about the temperature of tea in a train that is going off the rails."

Could Our Ukraine and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc prevent the final adoption of the proportional election bill and thus block constitutional reform as a whole? It seems that the chance to persuade the Socialists, let alone the Communists, into voting against the proportional election bill in its current form has been lost once and for all. But there is still a glimmer of hope that the support for the bill will be dropped by some deputies from the pro-government parliamentary coalition who were elected in 2002 in single-mandate constituencies under a first-past-the-post system. Reportedly, far from all of them are happy with the all-proportional election system, fearing that they may fail to secure an "electable place" on some party list in 2006.

UNIAN reported on March 5 that nearly 60 deputies elected primarily in single-mandate constituencies have addressed President Leonid Kuchma with an appeal to initiate a referendum to learn the electorate's opinion about an all-proportional election system. They reportedly pledge their support for the constitutional reform promoted by the pro-presidential camp but simultaneously warn that an all-proportional election system will be a "step back under today's circumstances" and will lead to "monopolization of the country's political life." The appeal also warns that a fully proportional election law will deform the representation of regions in the Verkhovna Rada and slacken the accountability of lawmakers to the local electorate.

It is not clear if the signatories of the appeal are sufficiently resolved to vote against the fully proportional election bill in its second reading. If they did so, then of course the passage of the constitutional-reform bill would be thrown into doubt.

Therefore, it is not out of the question that now, when the preliminarily approved election bill is being reviewed by the parliamentary Constitutional Committee, the committee may introduce some "regional modifications" to the fully proportional electoral procedure in order to address the fears of deputies elected in single-mandate constituencies and thus stifle their potential rebellion. That, in its turn, could raise objections on the part of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, whose ability for compromise on the election bill seems to have been exhausted by their consent to the lowering of the election threshold to 3 percent.

Jan Maksymiuk is the Belarus, Ukraine and Poland specialist on the staff of RFE/RL Newsline.

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