The U.S. presidential elections in November of this year increasingly resemble those of Ukraine six years ago in terms of the candidates, the voting and the potential undemocratic outlooks. U.S. voters are unlikely to act in the same way as their Ukrainian counterparts in the 2010 elections who voted against both candidates; therefore, Hilary Clinton will win this year’s elections because of negative and positive voting for her. In 2010, as readers will recall, Yulia Tymoshenko was defeated by some Ukrainian voters who refused to vote against Viktor Yanukovych by casting their ballots for her.
Donald J. Trump is the best opponent for Ms. Clinton because a sizeable number of Americans will vote against him (i.e., negative voting). Ms. Clinton will also be supported by the majority of women after Trump’s misogynous comments about them (http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/03/15/anti-donald-trump-ad-women-sot-ctn.cnn) and because she is the first woman to stand in a U.S. presidential election a century after they were given the vote. Minority groups, such as Hispanics – because of his blatant racism against Mexican immigrants and even those born in the U.S. of Mexican heritage, such as Judge Gonzalo Curiel – will also vote overwhelmingly for Ms. Clinton.
A Clinton victory is in Ukraine’s best history because Mr. Trump has supported a U.S. withdrawal from NATO (which would be the end of the security alliance), opposed sanctions against Russia and supported good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moscow, in turn, supports a victory for the racist, xenophobe and nationalistic Mr. Trump because his equivalent is very common in Russia in the form of Liberal Democratic Party leader Aleksandr Zhirinovsky, Russian National Unity party leader Aleksandr Barkashov, International Eurasia Movement leader Aleksandr Dugin, etc.
In many democratic and democratizing countries, voters are often placed in a quandary as to what to do in presidential elections when one candidate’s victory would lead to democratic regression and, in the case of Ukraine, the creation of a mafia and neo-Soviet authoritarian state (as I predicted Mr. Yanukovych’s election would do during the campaign and immediately after). In France and Austria, voters have supported the alternative to the neo-Nazi right in the former and the populist nationalist right in the latter. Indeed, a Socialist French friend of mine voted for Conservative candidate Jacques Chirac to block neo-Nazi National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in France’s 2002 elections. A Washington-based long-time Republican told me this month that he would be voting for Ms. Clinton even though he had not liked her since the 1990s.
This year’s U.S. elections also resemble Ukraine’s six years ago in the fact that the candidates have negative ratings. In this year’s U.S. elections both candidates have “net negative ratings in double digits, indicating the front-runners for each party’s presidential nominations are viewed negatively at historic levels” of 57 and 52 percent for Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton, respectively (http://edition.cnn.com/2016/ 03/22/politics/2016-election-poll-donald-trump-hillary-clinton/).
Nevertheless, U.S. voters will act more maturely than Ukrainian voters did six years ago and they will vote negatively against Mr. Trump (by voting for Ms. Clinton). In Ukraine in 2010, the so-called Lviv intelligentsia and nationalist Svoboda hated Ms. Tymoshenko more than they loved Ukraine when they followed President Viktor Yushchenko’s advice to vote against both Mr. Yanukovych and Ms. Tymoshenko. As only western and central Ukrainians listened to Mr. Yushchenko’s advice, it was obvious that this step would harm only Ms. Tymoshenko’s election chances.
It is ironic that western Ukrainians, who are the country’s strongest supporters of European integration, by voting against both candidates awarded their country to Mr. Yanukovych. From the Party of Regions documents and other documents provided by Hennadiy Moskal that have been transferred to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, we know that Viktor and Kateryna Yushchenko became very wealthy when they betrayed the Orange Revolution and Ukraine in 2010. It is also obvious why Svoboda acted in this way, because they were always funded by eastern Ukrainian oligarchs. What is still to this day more difficult to fathom is the actions of the arrogant Lviv intelligentsia.
In the 2010 elections, if Ukrainians had acted like Europeans and Americans, they would have blocked Mr. Yanukovych’s election by voting against him. There was a massive increase in the vote for Ms. Tymoshenko’s of 20 percent between the first and second rounds of the vote, compared to only 14 percent for Mr. Yanukovych. Although Mr. Yanukovych bragged to the U.S. ambassador that he would win by over 10 percent, he barely won by 3.5 percent.
If Ukrainians had stopped Mr. Yanukovych in his tracks in 2010 (as Americans no doubt will stop Mr. Trump this year) a Tymoshenko presidency would have produced four outcomes for Ukraine.
Firstly, Ukraine would have signed the Association Agreement with the European Union far earlier and its European integration, therefore, would have been quite advanced by the next Ukrainian presidential elections in 2015. With Ukraine’s European integration irreversible, it would have been too late for Vladimir Putin to pressure Ukraine to join the Eurasian Union that came into operation in 2015.
Secondly, the preparations would have not been laid for Russia’s annexation of the Crimea four years later, a step that I predicted would take place in an article written in March 2010 (http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=36104&no_cache=1#.V1l3xZN97Jw ) and in a monograph published in November 2010 titled “The Crimea: Europe’s Next Flashpoint?” (http://www.taraskuzio.net/books5.html). If it was obvious to me that from the earliest that Mr. Yanukovych was ready to act in this treasonous way, why was it not for the Lviv intelligentsia who still to this day believe they were right?
Thirdly, Mr. Yanukovych would have been prevented from establishing a mafia state – one that he bankrupted after he came to power. There would not have been a Euro-Maidan revolution or protesters murdered on the streets of Kyiv and Donetsk.
Finally, Mr. Yanukovych’s second election defeat would have led to a new more moderate leader of the Party of Regions (maybe Sergey Tigipko) and it may have ushered in changes within the party. Certainly, without a President Yanukovych there would have not been separatism in the Donbas supported by a Russia that was allowed to undertake what I described already in June 2010 as the “Putinization” of Ukraine’s security forces (http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=36517&no_cache=1#.V1l-zJN97Jw).
In democratic and democratizing states, the candidates that are fighting for the highest position in the land can sometimes be the wrong persons, whether Mr. Le Pen in France in 2002, Mr. Yanukovych in 2010 in Ukraine, Norbert Hofer in Austria and Mr. Trump in the U.S. in 2016. That is why negative voting is useful in preventing states from being taken over by Nazis, Mafia traitors and nationalist-populists.
Dr. Taras Kuzio is a senior research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, and author of “Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption and the New Russian Imperialism” (Praeger, 2015), a modern history of Ukraine from 1953 to the present, and the forthcoming book “Russia’s War Against Ukraine: Nationalism, Identity and Crime.”