Currently
watching events from Warsaw, Ukraine’s parliamentary elections look potentially
messy. On the one hand, the election law is clearly designed to wrap things up
for the incumbent powers that be, and this is being reinforced by various
political technologies such as well-funded decoy parties and the invented
‘language issue’ most likely designed and timed to get Eastern and Southern
Ukrainians’ eyes off the ball. On the other hand, the political capital built
up by the previous three major elections (two parliamentary and one
presidential) are the last remaining pillar of integrity that Ukraine has
comparing to its peers Belarus and Russia. If election day is marred by
ballot-stuffing, bussed-in voters and other tomfoolery that last remaining
pillar will dissolve and two and a half years of deterioration of democracy and
freedom in Ukraine will be utterly rubber-stamped. I’m personally sceptical
about whether violations can be avoided given the disposition of the rank and
file of those now in power, for whom the art of the possible trumps
constitutionalism every time.
And even if
the election is free (it already cannot be fair) it is not clear exactly what
people are voting for. Voters will (presumably) have no idea who is on the
lists and half the deputies will be elected under constituency mandates. That
has seen plenty of ‘bread and circuses’ manoeuvres from those in the current
power structures to get them home safely. Once the elections have taken place,
now that the constitutional court has contradicted its own ruling by endorsing
the tushki, we will in all likelihood
see a clearing house which will, it is assumed, be able to iron out the
election result and knock it into the kind of shape the authorities would like
to see. In Ukraine’s unconstitutionalised (my word) society it’s all but
forgotten that the legitimate ‘owners’ of the parliamentary mandate from the
previous parliamentary elections are in fact STILL the so-called orange parties
of Tymoshenko and the Our Ukraine-People’s Self Defence bloc. Therefore the
‘result’ this time too stands to be forgotten once things have sorted
themselves out.
So, the
problem for Ukrainians is that they don’t really know what they are voting for,
and the relationship between the ‘result’ and the ‘outcome’ could be abstract
to say the least. Therefore, if participating as a pragmatist, what are the
options for Ukraine’s voters?
Voting for the
Party of Regions is certainly an option if one is satisfied that life has
improved in the past two and a half years. Anecdotally one or two things have
improved such as, in my experience, snow clearing in Kiev. One also has to
wonder if Euro 2012 would indeed have been a shambles under the previous
government, but we will never know, and that was already nearly four months
ago, and life moves on. However, voting for the Party of Regions is not the
only way to, in effect, vote for the presidential party. Various decoy parties
will look to feed discontent back in to the pot. It is pleasing however that,
despite well-funded campaigns (including Natalia Korelevska irking us all
during every advert break during Euro 2012) and gimmicks such as hiring in
former footballers, the polls suggest the electorate isn’t going to go for
them. As has been said many times, Svoboda also feeds indirectly back into the
Party of Regions, if nothing else as the justifier of Yanukovych’s culturally
pro-Russian policies. The Regions Party itself may not be the bastion of
stability they’d have us believe. As a coalition of interests it is extremely
vulnerable as even within that group the number really benefiting is small, and
there are suggestions that divisions exist not too far below the surface on
issues such as the DCFTA/Customs Union and Tymoshenko.
Yatseniuk
(who his former English teacher called ‘the only intelligent person I met in
Ukraine’) could finally step into an important role. The accusation that his
party is the Spravedlivaya
Rossiya of Ukraine doesn’t seem to have stuck, but the the tie up with Batkivshchyna looks risky to me. The image of
Tymoshenko in the western media (just this week a writer in The Guardian
compared her, quite absurdly, to Aung San Suu Kyi) and in Brussels does not play so well at home.
Tymoshenko shouldn’t be in prison for what she’s in prison for, and the
authorities have foolishly created a martyr, but there’s little evidence from
her time as PM that she is the answer to any of the country’s problems.
Most
interestingly, Klitschko’s UDAR seem to finally be bridging the credibility gap
at the best possible time. If you’re looking to vote pragmatically this might
be the place to look. Klitschko is almost unique in Ukrainian politics, having
made his way to fame and prosperity by the relatively honest means of sporting
success rather than in the murky and corrupt world of Ukrainian business. He
speaks at least three languages and having spent much of his life in Germany
his broader world view and understanding of both the European and post-Soviet
ways of doing things has to be an advantage.
Once the
dust has settled, I suspect the President will basically still be in control of
parliament. Even though his oligarchic backers have complained for quite some
time that he has not been putting his energies into representing their interests,
the fact remains that his appointees are in all the organs of state power. Such
people are however fickle and if there was a real change in the way the wind
was blowing some of those people might change their minds very quickly indeed.
Personally
what I would most like to see from these elections is the resuscitation of the Verkhovna Rada and an
end to the rubber stamp parliament and the piano player voting which has been
one of the most depressing aspects of Ukraine’s politics over the past two
years. Ukraine badly needs a functioning parliament which would necessitate
consensus-based decisions across a range of stakeholders (accepting that for
the foreseeable future, deputies of the Rada will still be in it largely for
their own ends). I would like to see the vindictive edge taken off the
government’s current policies and the firing of the education minister with
immediate effect. I also hope that Kiev and Kiev region does not go down the
path of adopting Russian as a second language. I would also like to see a halt
to the general ‘Donbasisation’ of the business environment. It is frightening
investors and will turn out to be massively counterproductive. So the question
of who wins is really not even the half of it. I also hope Femen might stay at
home this time.
