EDITORIAL: High-stakes elections (03/15/98)

EDITORIAL

High-stakes elections

If politics can be likened to a game of chance, the game being played in Ukraine today is poker. It is not a penny ante, neighborhood game among friends. The stakes are high: Ukraine's future political direction.

There are 30 political parties at the table. The one holding the best cards is the Communist Party, generally believed to have assured itself of anywhere from 11 to 17 percent of the vote, depending on what poll one believes. It is by far the largest electoral support for any single political party.

Rukh, which had been a strong player early on - at one time with double digit support among voters in some polls - has seen its percentages dwindle to about five.

The Green Party of Ukraine, on the other hand, has come on surprisingly strong, thanks to a steady and effective stream of television advertising.

The political center has a good broad-based foundation of support among the electorate, but it is divided among almost a score of parties, most of which will be able to garner at most a percentage point or two of voter support on March 29.

However, what will probably mark this election season in history (if it's not the landslide victory of the political left, which is still a real possibility) will be the scale of political mudslinging, fighting and backstabbing.

Pavlo Lazarenko, leader of the Hromada Party, and his ex-friend and political partner President Leonid Kuchma, who is now his fiercest political opponent, are locked in a verbal duel over who is most corrupt.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Green Miller, speaking in Washington recently, said the election season has produced "an enormous amount of recriminations, threats of exposures of corruption ... a messy campaign." But Mr. Miller also said that "it is a very healthy, democratic campaign."

Can the election season in Ukraine really be considered healthy and democratic when, in Odesa, Mayor Eduard Hurvits says that several killings of political and press figures are related to his political feud with the Odesa Oblast leader, Ruslan Bodelan, or, in Crimea, a member of the Central Election Committee is gunned down and whispers are heard that he had made deals with unnamed politicians?

In the latest incident, which casts another shadow over these elections, on March 9 Mykhailo Brodsky, chairman of the bankrupt Dendi Bank, owner of the Kyiv tabloid Kievskie Viedomosti and political candidate for mayor of Kyiv, has been arrested for allegedly stealing $2 million from depositors. His supporters say this is a political recrimination over corruption allegations his newspaper made last year against Minister of Internal Affairs Yurii Kravchenko.

So, is this a healthy campaign? Hardly. And only time will tell whether the elections will turn out to be truly democratic. International election observers who are now arriving in Ukraine will tell us more about that after March 29.

We do hope, however, that Ambassador Miller is correct in his prediction that these next elections will be the last in which the old power elite of the Soviet system will continue to hold influence over Ukraine. We would actually like to think that these will be the elections that remove the old guard from power. But even a diehard gambler wouldn't take that bet.

We also hope that Ukraine's electorate will understand that it alone is responsible for making the political changes needed to set Ukraine firmly on the track toward becoming a law-abiding democratic state. Sadly, polls show that one-third of Ukrainians have not decided whether they will vote or have decided it is not worth the effort.

With two weeks to go before election day, the cards are down and they are dirty. Only one question remains: Does anybody have an ace up their sleeve, or has the political left pulled another winning hand?