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01.10.07
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Another Battle Between Orange And Blue
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By Dmitry Babich
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Ukraine Votes in Snap Parliamentary Elections
As Ukraine’s Central Electoral Commission continued to count the votes after Sunday’s elections, a wild array of statements about victories, possible coalitions and complaints about voting irregularities continued coming from all sides through Monday. There is nothing surprising about that. In the opinion of Vladimir Malenkovich, a veteran Ukrainian political scientist and the head of the Ukrainian branch of the International Institute of Humanitarian and Political Studies, the real outcome of this election will depend more on the deals between various factions in the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, than on the voters’ will.
As the experts predicted, Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions received the most votes, but it only barely edged past Yulia Tymoshenko's eponymous bloc. According to exit polls, the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko received between 31-33 percent of the vote, a 10 percent increase over the 22 percent the party won in parliamentary elections in March 2006. According to the statements released by the Central Electoral Commission when 68 percent of the vote had been counted, the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko had pushed ahead of the Party of Regions, 32.6 percent to 31.57. The combined data of several exit polls, however, still gave the Party of Regions a lead of 35.3 percent over 31.5 for the Tymoshenko bloc. However, combined exit polls also indicated that Our Ukraine-National Self-Defense, the party of President Viktor Yushchenko, had received 13.5 percent of the vote, which makes an Orange coalition in the Rada possible. The long history of squabbles between Tymoshenko and the leaders of Our Ukraine leaves the option in question, though, leaving some options open for the Party of Regions.
In addition to their internal divisions, the success of the pro-Western liberal forces is also tempered by the relative success of several pro-Russian leftist parties, including the Communist Party of Ukraine, which is polling at 5.1 percent, the bloc of former Rada Speaker Volodymyr Litvyn, which claims 4 percent of the vote and possibly the Socialist Party of Ukraine, headed by outgoing Rada Speaker Oleksandr Moroz. Monday afternoon, the socialists were still teetering on the brink of the 3 percent minimum required for a party to be represented in Rada. According to the latest data from the Central Electoral Commission of Ukraine, the Socialist Party had received 2.99 percent of the vote.
If current trends continue, this election will bring at least two sensations, one expected and the other a surprise. The first is the defeat and possible exclusion from power politics of Moroz, who has been a major figure in Ukrainian politics since the early 1990s. One of the main challengers to former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma in the presidential election of 1999, Moroz was the main force behind the campaign for Kuchma’s impeachment in 2001, when the president was accused of being involved in the murder of journalist Gueorgy Gongadze. In 2006, Moroz joined a coalition led by Viktor Yanukovych, Kuchma's prime minister and preferred successor, which compromised his reformist credentials.
“I think this is important that the voters have punished Moroz and his party for the betrayal of their principles,” said Oleg Mevedev, a political spin doctor and supporter of Tymoshenko’s bloc. “This is an important part of the democratic process. Civil society should have a long memory, it should not allow get away with such things. In terms of serious politics, Moroz is history now.”
The other, bigger sensation, however, is the success of the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, particularly its regional component. According to an announcement made by Vladimir Shapoval, the chairman of the Central Electoral Commission, the Tymoshenko Bloc won 16 out of Ukraine’s 25 regions, demonstrating that it can be successful not only in the traditionally nationalist western part of Ukraine (where the Bloc took 51.3 percent of the vote in Lviv Region), but also in Ukraine’s largely Russian-speaking center (47 percent in Kiev Region, 38 percent in Poltava Region). The Party of Regions was only successful in Yanukovych’s native Donetsk, where it claimed 71.44 percent of the votes, the other Russian-speaking eastern regions of Ukraine and the Crimea, where the Party of Regions took a dominant 63.8 percent of the vote.
Yanukovych’s relatively poor showing could be explained by his failure to deliver on his promises of giving official status to the Russian language and forging closer economic ties with Russia.
“When the coalition of national unity [headed by Yanukovych] controlled the Rada, there were at least two dozen draft laws that suggested improvements in the situation of the Russian language in Ukraine,” said Vladimir Kornilov, the head of the Ukrainian affiliate of the Moscow based-Institute of CIS Countries. “Right now, Russian is considered a foreign language in a country where many millions of people consider it their native language. Attempts were made to give it the status of not a state, but some kind of an 'official; language, but the Constitutional Court ruled that there is only one language in Ukraine, which is both the state and the official one – Ukrainian. As a result, under Yanukovych, the number of schools teaching in Russian continued to shrink.”
The other issues high on Yanukovych’s agenda during the 2006 parliamentary elections,including the federalization of Ukraine and the country’s cooperation with NATO, remained unresolved with no progress expected in the near future.
“Even the Orange Defense Minister [Anatoly] Gritsenko agreed that no prime minister has done more for Ukraine’s integration into NATO than Yanukovych,” said Kost Bondarenko, the director of the Kiev-based Gorshenin Institute of Management Problems. “No matter which party wins election, the pro-Western policy continues. This makes a lot of people depressed and discourages them from voting for the Party of Regions. People vote for smaller parties or do not vote at all.”
The relative successes of the Communist Party and the Bloc of Volodymyr Litvyn - who has been advocating against the anti-Russian tilt in Ukrainian politics - may be yet more proof of Bondarenko’s theory.
As for Russian politicians, their reaction to the Ukrainian elections was predictably gloomy and skeptical, as the colorful drama of Ukrainian elections makes Russian democracy look somewhat over-managed.
“This election has not resolved the crisis inside Ukrainian state,” said Vadim Gustov, a member of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament and the head of a group of Russian observers of the Ukrainian elections.
‘The East and the West [of Ukraine] voted for various leaders. The result of this can only be a muddled, unclear policy,” RIA Novosti quoted Duma Chairman Boris Gryzlov as saying. |
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