ANALYSIS: The Ukrainian parliamentary election campaign: parties aplenty, but how much democracy? (01/04/98)

ANALYSIS

The Ukrainian parliamentary election campaign:
parties aplenty, but how much democracy?

by Markian Bilynskyj

KYIV - The chairman of the newly constituted Central Electoral Commission (CEC) on November 14, 1997, announced the official start of the March 1998 parliamentary election campaign. In fact, the campaign had begun in earnest much earlier. Some political parties had already held their election-dominated party conferences even before President Leonid Kuchma somewhat reluctantly signed the new election law on October 23. Together with the creation of the CEC this was the key precondition for the campaign's formal commencement.

The new election law creates a so-called mixed majoritarian-proportional system. Two hundred and twenty five deputies will be elected directly in single mandate majoritarian districts. An additional 225 deputies will enter the Verkhovna Rada on party lists in proportion to the number of votes their political party receives nationwide. In order to be represented in the Verkhovna Rada, parties must receive no less than 4 percent of the total votes cast.

Neither the adoption of the election law nor the creation of the CEC were straightforward affairs. The election law was adopted by the Verkhovna Rada after approximately nine months of sometimes acrimonious debate. During that time, alliances formed and vanished in almost kaleidoscopic fashion, as new and established parties sought to secure the inside track by shifting their support between the various electoral models. Indeed, one of the few constant features was the almost identical stance adopted by Rukh and the Communists - the only two Ukrainian parties that can genuinely claim to have anything beyond a narrow regional influence - as they strove to consolidate their edge at their respective ends of the political spectrum.

Moreover, President Kuchma proved to be a rather reluctant midwife to the new election law. The reason behind the president's vacillation was a nagging uncertainty within the administration - an uncertainty characterized by the fact that the president had on at least three occasions publicly changed his preference for the various electoral models - over what kind of Verkhovna Rada the new election law would produce.

At one point in mid-October, the president had even made a public show of seriously considering the arguments of those national deputies who claimed that the mixed electoral law is unconstitutional. The primary objection of opponents is that the law discriminates against independent candidates by allowing those on party lists to run simultaneously in single mandate constituencies. (These national deputies remain fundamentally opposed to the mixed system and will very likely petition the Constitutional Court in the near future.) Eventually, however, President Kuchma simply returned the law to the Verkhovna Rada with some relatively minor observations. The Verkhovna Rada very quickly accommodated these reservations, leaving the president little choice but to sign the law.

The major contention regarding the CEC concerned not so much the law itself but the commission's composition. Being responsible, among other things, for approving party lists, the lists of voter signatures and, most critically, supervising and approving ballot counting, the CEC will play a critical role not only in the forthcoming parliamentary elections but also in the 1999 presidential elections.

The list submitted by President Kuchma for Verkhovna Rada approval contained several nominees from the administration. The president's apparently blatant attempt to pack the CEC was unacceptable to many national deputies - and not just from the left - who were quick to claim that this was simply the president's latest attempt to stall election preparations as a pretext for their eventual cancellation. President Kuchma categorically refused to submit alternative nominees, and a compromise was eventually reached whereby all but the most obvious pro-presidential individuals were approved.

This compromise gave the CEC the necessary two-thirds quorum with which it could begin its work. (President Kuchma has in fact vetoed the CEC law on the grounds that certain provisions compromise its independent status. Administration spokesmen insisted that this did not prevent the CEC from functioning because the president had no reservations over the mechanism by which the members of the CEC themselves had been confirmed.)

Differences between the Verkhovna Rada and the president are nothing new. What was more interesting in the dispute over the CEC were the dynamics within the Verkhovna Rada itself. Several groups had a shared interest in prolonging the deadlock. First, there were elements of the left, and some independents, who supported the old, exclusively majoritarian electoral system. Having lost that particular battle, they saw the CEC issue as another way of frustrating the implementation of a new electoral system.

Then, there were those parties - principally the Communist, and Socialist and Peasants' (SPP) - that viewed any delay as a way to put the squeeze on potential competitors. Under the new election law each party had to collect at least 200,000 voters' signatures (including at least 10,000 from 14 separate oblasts) by December 19, 1997. The larger parties - such as the Communists and Rukh, as well as possibly the SPP, the National Democratic Party of Ukraine (NDPU) and the Agrarian Party - possess a sufficiently broad party or political base to have met this target under a very compressed schedule without difficulty.

For the Communists and the SPP the target was, and remains, the maverick Progressive Socialist Party (PSP). For the purposes of the parliamentary elections at least, the PSP has settled into a potentially rewarding populist groove of criticizing the leadership of the traditional left (including Oleksander Moroz, the Socialist chairman of the Verkhovna Rada) for betraying their ideological heritage no less vigorously than it attacks the Kuchma administration and government. This kind of procedural attrition could also have worked in favor of the larger parties at the other end of the spectrum, such as Rukh and the PDP.

Most observers concur that money will play a much bigger role in these parliamentary elections than in 1994 and that support will therefore not necessarily be based on political convictions. Thus, it is very difficult at the moment to predict which parties will actually cross the 200,000 signature threshold. Indeed, by the end of the first week of the official campaign, newspapers began carrying reports of some of the smaller parties and blocs literally buying signatures so as to clear the first hurdle.

President Kuchma's concerns over the likely outcome of the parliamentary elections are not unfounded. He has understandably avoided openly associating himself with any particular party. Instead, the president has publicly identified the left as the unacceptable face of any Verkhovna Rada and declared his support for, and willingness to work with, all centrist forces.

What this means in practice, however, is difficult to determine. Although the left is heading toward the elections as a much less coherent entity than in 1994, the center - however defined - is as divided as ever. Opinion polls show that around 40 percent of respondents with a preference would vote for moderates. Thus, squeezing into the increasingly crowded niche on either side, but within touching distance of the political center, is very much the order of the day for many relatively established parties as well as the parvenus.

Voter identification with the center, however, is somewhat abstract and hence tenuous. Very few voters (or, indeed, experts) can, for example, readily differentiate between the platforms of most of the parties now claiming - in the case of the extreme right Ukrainian National Assembly, amusingly so - centrist credentials.

Currently, the center consists of approximately 15 parties and blocs. Politically - use economic criteria and the arrangement changes somewhat - the center can be said to range from the Social Democrats Party (Unified), or SDP(U), ironically born of a party schism, and former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko's Hromada party on the left, to Rukh (whose original national democratic message now has a marked social democratic content), and possibly the National Front (an alliance of nationalist parties such as the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Republican Party and the Conservative Republican Party) on the right. The edges of this scheme are further blurred by the fact that it is not at all easy to differentiate between, say, the Moroz parliamentary wing of the SPP and some members of the SDP(U), such as another former prime minister, Yevhen Marchuk, and of Hromada, including Mr. Lazarenko himself.

While there was much talk of creating a unified centrist bloc, the idea has again failed to blossom, once more falling foul of narrow political, more accurately leadership, ambitions. Therefore, many centrist parties have settled for a, thus far, rather half-hearted call to coordinate candidacies in single mandate constituencies so as not to take votes away from each other. (Such proposals will almost certainly be taken much more seriously closer to election time.)

The first attempt to coordinate something along these lines was in fact undertaken by President Kuchma. On October 3, 1997, he persuaded the representatives of nine parties to sign a memorandum of cooperation. Almost immediately, however, the parties began denying that their signatures represented a compromise of their political identities. But the president's motives were clear enough and were reiterated by his chief of staff, Yevhen Kushnariov, at a November 26, 1997, press briefing: President Kuchma sees these parties as the most likely source of support within the next Verkhovna Rada for his and the government's policies (as well as for his possible re- election bid).

However, short-term goals, such as in this case the principally negative one of preventing the left from exploiting differences among the centrists, remain a central feature of post-independence Ukrainian politics. This enduring reality is simply brought into sharper relief during periods of heightened political activity.

Extrapolating from current dynamics, President Kuchma's future relationship with the parliamentary center is unlikely to differ greatly from the position in which he finds himself today. Beyond a core of usually supportive parties, he must rely on his ability or, most crucially, his inclination or disinclination to form issue-specific alliances with individuals or groups of individuals wherever he can find them within the Verkhovna Rada.

As money will help determine which parties will clear the first formal electoral obstacle, celebrity will play a key role in helping parties negotiate the second, 4 percent vote, barrier. It is premature to argue that Ukrainian politics is now shaped by the kind of triumph of style over substance so characteristic of a growing number of Western electoral processes. Yet given that most centrist parties are very new, regionally based and divided less by philosophy than by irreconcilable personality conflicts, resorting to gimmickry offers the best way of winning over the hearts (if not the minds) of a sufficient number of voters for just as long as it takes for them to mark their ballot paper. Thus, while some popular entertainers have thrown in their lot with political parties out of conviction - with Rukh and the Communists among the beneficiaries - others, or more accurately their agents, have rather less than discreetly hinted that their clients are available for hire.

Celebrity comes in many forms. The most successful example of this new political symbiosis is offered by the Social Democrats Party (Unified), who can be considered a serious party with an essentially appealing message for the many Ukrainians with a visceral affinity for the left of center.

In contrast, the most glaring failures in this regard have been the Democratic Party of Ukraine (DPU) and the Christian Republican Party (CRP). The DPU placed Deputy Prime Minister Serhii Tyhypko second on their ticket but without his consent. This put the DPU in the embarrassing position of having to remove Mr. Tyhypko's name from the list when he made it clear that he would not be running for Parliament, but should he elect to do so he would choose his party allegiance on his own. The CRP found itself in an almost identical position, being too eager to announce that Leonid Kadenyuk, who on November 21, 1997, became independent Ukraine's first astronaut as part of the current Shuttle mission, would run on their ticket.

At their party conference the SDP(U) surprisingly announced that the top two berths in their party ticket will go to former President Leonid Kravchuk and ex-Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk, respectively. The party leader, former Minister of Justice Vasyl Onopenko, will run third, a small - and very likely temporary - inconvenience given that the SDP(U) has now managed to raise its profile considerably in what is undoubtedly at present the most crowded part of the political spectrum. But what are the possible implications for the voter, and, by extension, the idea of representative democracy?

None of these maneuverings can detract from the fact that Messrs. Kravchuk and Marchuk are genuine political heavyweights. But while there can be little doubting their commitment to the idea of social democracy - an identification that can only be consolidated among the electorate at large through their relationship with the SDP(U) - there are genuine doubts about their commitment to the SDP(U) itself. In fact, neither is a party member.

Thus, the SDP(U) presence in the next Verkhovna Rada might be attributable in no small measure to two individuals who will probably choose to represent their single mandate districts - where they are unlikely to be seriously challenged - as independents. Mr. Onopenko will return to the top berth, and the natural order of things will have been re-established within the SDP(U). But those who voted for the party (a distinction must be drawn between them and SDP(U) supporters) on the basis of the appeal of the Kravchuk-Marchuk dominated ticket will most certainly have been short-changed, and, arguably, deceived. (How many of these voters will actually care is, of course, a completely different issue.)

This is not the only shortcoming of the current system. Just as before, there is nothing in the new electoral regime that obliges an incumbent national deputy to run for re-election in his or her original constituency. This deprives constituents of their only real opportunity to pass judgment on his or her performance. (Running on a party ticket obviously offers yet another way of avoiding the negative consequences of possible voter censure.)

Moreover, anyone wishing to discover something more substantial concerning these peripatetic candidates, in order to make a more informed choice will have to contend with a recent ruling of the Constitutional Court.

The verdict in the Ustymenko case essentially denies access to confidential information on someone without that individual's consent. Confidential information includes, among other things, education, marital status, religious convictions, state of health, date and place of birth, and financial status. Most remarkably, because of sloppy legislating, this anonymity is applicable only to those national deputies running on party tickets. (Candidates running simultaneously on party tickets and in single mandate districts are obliged to reveal biographical details in the latter case only!) While it has not yet caused much concern within the Verkhovna Rada itself, this absurdity is hardly conducive to the creation of an atmosphere that would encourage people to take an active interest in the elections.

By commencing the consolidation of political parties within the Verkhovna Rada, the new electoral system does offer the promise of an eventually more broadly based, accountable system of government. But it does little more than that in the present. Indeed, it is even possible to argue, without much risk of exaggeration, that the first systematic steps towards consolidating party-based democracy in Ukraine are to begin with the paradox - that pervasive and enduring Ukrainian condition - of a somewhat circumscribed democracy; in other words, one existing largely to serve the Ukrainian political elite, which, despite impending months of rhetoric to the contrary, continues to define itself primarily in terms of its own immediate interests and apart from, rather than as an organic part of, Ukrainian society as a whole.

Markian Bilynskyj is director of the Pylyp Orlyk Institute, an independent public policy, research and information center located in Kyiv that is supported by the Washington-based U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.