Verkhovna Rada relents, passing election bill favored by Kuchma (09/16/01)

Verkhovna Rada relents, passing election bill favored by Kuchma

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada under staunch pressure from President Leonid Kuchma relented on September 13 and abandoned its version of an election bill in favor of one more to his liking.

After a prolonged political battle between the two branches of government, which had begun almost exactly eight months ago, the national deputies approved a bill by a vote of 244 to 132 that will keep the basic mixed election system that was in place for the previous parliamentary elections, with changes made to bring it into line with a ruling of the Constitutional Court.

The new law again will give 50 percent or 225 seats in the new Verkhovna Rada to the political parties who attain at least a 4 percent share of the votes in the elections scheduled for March 30, 2002. The other 50 percent are to be selected by majority vote in 225 electoral districts into which the country will be divided, as was the case in the 1998 parliamentary elections.

The passage of the latest version of the bill is the culmination of a political test of wills begun back on January 18 after the Verkhovna Rada approved a draft that would have elected all the members of Parliament exclusively by the percentage of the popular vote their party took.

President Kuchma vetoed that bill and another one aimed at compromise and approved on June 9, which would have split the election of the national deputies along a 75/25 percent divide between party lists and by-district voting.

Mr. Kuchma has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian society is not sufficiently politically mature and the party system is not adequately developed to allow for so many national deputies to be elected based on their party affiliation. He also has said that the strictly proportional system would lead to an even more clan-dominated Parliament.

That the president had won the political battle became apparent three days before the final vote when First Vice-Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Viktor Medvedchuk admitted that he and the parliamentary consensus committee had agreed to support the 50/50 mixed election system endorsed by the president. Mr. Medvedchuk's Social Democratic Party (United), which today has the strongest organizational structure of any Ukrainian political organization and could have most benefited from a proportional system, had pushed strongly for such an election system.

Mr. Medvedchuk explained at a weekly parliamentary press briefing on September 10 that his party had relented and agreed to the 50/50 compromise because with so little time to the beginning of the official election campaign - which was to have started on October 12 according to the old law - the Verkhovna Rada had to act quickly.

"We could support one of the other bills and end up with insufficient votes to pass any of them," explained Mr. Medvedchuk. "Given the amount of time left, this could prove to be disastrous."

The time frame was critical because the Constitutional Court had declared after the 1998 elections to Parliament that the law based upon which those elections were held was unconstitutional. It said, however, that it would let the vote stand, but called for a new law on elections before the beginning of the next campaign season. For several reasons, most of which relate to the hot political animosity that has existed between the executive and legislative branches, the new law did not get to the voting stage until the beginning of this year. With varying versions twice vetoed, it had reached a critical juncture because, without a new law by October 12, there was a threat that no elections would be held.

The national deputies had two alternatives to the 50/50 bill. One was an attempt to override the presidential veto on the 75/ 25 election bill and the other, a completely new bill calling for a 66/33-split between the by-party proportional system and a by-district majoritarian one.

The vote to override the presidential veto failed when only 242 of a required 300 national deputies supported the effort, while the 66/33-mixed system proposal was defeated soundly.

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