Workshop offers comparative perspective on Ukrainian presidential elections (02/20/05)

Workshop offers comparative perspective on Ukrainian presidential elections

by Oksana Zakydalsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

TORONTO - How did it happen? Why did it happen? What does it all mean? We mean, of course, the Orange Revolution. Has anyone talked about anything else in the last two months? These questions were interwoven into the presentations at the workshop "Ukrainian Presidential Elections of 2004 in Comparative Perspective" held on Friday, January 21, and co-sponsored by the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine and the Wolodymyr George Danyliw Program at the University of Toronto.

The lecture room quickly filled to capacity - fire regulations forced some of the audience of over 130 person to take part via video in another room. The participants included: Marta Dyczok, University of Western Ontario; Taras Kuzio, George Washington University; Paul D'Anieri, University of Kansas; and Michael A. McFaul, Stanford University and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Attorney Daniel Bilak, who served as senior advisor to the government of Ukraine from 1995 to 2002, joined the presenters in the panel discussions.

Although Prof. Kuzio's talk was formally titled "Russia and Ukraine: Transition Paths Diverge," he called it "Ukraine is not Russia" and focused on the mistaken assumptions and wrong tactics of the Russian advisors to the Leonid Kuchma government and the Viktor Yanukovych camp. (One wonders if these advisors had heard of President Leonid Kuchma's book "Ukraine is not Russia"). The basic reason for such a misreading of the situation, according to Prof. Kuzio, was the fact that most Russians still don't see Ukraine as a foreign country.

Prof. Kuzio listed some differences between the politics of Mr. Putin's Russia and today's Ukraine. President Putin has created a very united party of power, Unified Russia, which won 38 percent support in the last elections. Mr. Kuchma was never able to create such a party, and a strong party of power is the key to creating an authoritarian state. In Ukraine, the Parliament plays a more important role - it was there that the opposition gained strength in the years 2001-2002. Civil society was important in mobilizing the opposition in Ukraine, whereas the rating of Russia on the creation of civil society is declining. Just recently, Freedom House downgraded Russia from "partially free" to "unfree" status.

Furthermore, according to Prof. Kuzio, some of the Yanukovych campaign tactics didn't work or backfired: saying that Viktor Yushchenko didn't have a chance and portraying him as a "candidate of the diaspora" while Mr. Yanukovych was promoted as the candidate of the industrial regions and the urban centers of modern central Ukraine. In fact, Mr. Yushchenko dominated central Ukraine. Mr. Yanukovych proved to be an excellent candidate - for the opposition, and many people actually found him to be an odious person. "I don't want my children to live in a country headed by a criminal," were words heard frequently, noted Dr. Kuzio.

The Ukrainian authorities were sure that they couldn't lose an election when economic growth was so high, and they were brazen in their use of administrative resources that they went too far - the massive abuses in compiling electoral lists and stuffing ballot boxes backfired. The anti-American campaign also did not play out, Dr. Kuzio continued, especially among the young, who look Westward not Eastward. Thanks to the Orange Revolution, the fact that Ukraine is not Russia is finally getting through to the world, even to the Western media, he concluded.

Prof. Dyczok focused on the power of television in shaping the events around the election. At first, there was only one TV channel, Channel 5, that did not succumb to official censorship, although, being a cable channel, it covered less than 40 percent of the country and was blocked in most parts of the east and south. But the fact that it did exist, that some real news about the events on Independence Square was getting out was important in finally breaking the back of censorship, said Prof. Dyzczok.

On the night of the November 21 election, news journalists on Channel 1+1 staged a revolt and refused to present a censored version of the news. Prof. Dyczok showed a TV clip of the November 25 broadcast where the entire news team announced that they were no longer going to censor the news they were reporting. The same night, Inter TV broadcast a live talk show with Petro Poroshenko as invited guest and finally even the state-owned national channel UT1 submitted to the demands of their journalists and released them from censorship. Many saw this lifting of censorship as a sign of the end of the old regime, Prof. Dyczok concluded.

Prof. D'Anieri stressed institutional changes and listed three such changes that Ukraine is undergoing, partly as a result of the Orange Revolution and partly as a result of other changes that were already under way: 1) the shift to a parliamentary system from a presidential system; b) the shift to a fully proportional electoral system from a mixed one; and c) the shift to an imperative mandate which means that a seat in Parliament belongs not to the candidate but to the party. These three institutional shifts will take Ukraine away from a winner-take-all system. "Those three changes are making Ukrainian politics similar to an idealized norm of Western European politics and to the politics of the more successful post-communist democracies," he explained.

How is this going to affect Ukrainian politics? There will be a shift of center stage to the battle to forge a majority in the Verkhovna Rada. Secondly, with the parliamentary elections next year, the focus will shift to forming and building real parties, blocs of parties, developing candidate lists, etc. "In the next year, Mr. Yushchenko will have all the incentive in the world to go after Mr. Kuchma's machine that has been built up. It will be interesting to see what tactics he uses as he will have a lot of power at his disposal," Prof. d'Anieri concluded.

Prof. McFaul called the Orange Revolution "the event of the decade" and pointed out some of the features it shared with Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003. The key common feature was what he called "the breakthrough democratic election" - all three showed how an election can be a focal point for a real political breakthrough. In the case of Ukraine, the important factor about the election was the creation of the perception of a falsified election and the ability to get that information out fast. It was the perception that Mr. Yushchenko had really won the election that got the people out and mobilized the crowd in the capital.

Does Russia have characteristics for such a revolution? Absolutely not, said Prof. McFaul. There are divisions within the elite in Moscow, the leader is becoming increasingly unpopular, there is no unity of the democratic forces and, because of the absence of a civil society, there is no ability to show a falsified election or communicate a falsified vote. Prof. McFaul added: "I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with Russians since the Orange Revolution that they had thought everything was stable in the region. But now it's been three in a row, Russia backed all three of the losers."

During the discussion, Prof. Olya Andriewska of Trent University questioned the use of the term "revolution," saying that it was premature, as whether there will be substantial changes in Ukraine is still to be seen. Prof. Orest Subtelny (York University) disagreed and called what had occurred "paradigm shifts." The first paradigm was the fact that Russians have always seen the empire in terms of family - you're stuck together forever, you can't just pack up and leave and you have obligations to each other. Now it has been shown that parts of this "family" merely want to be neighbors - to live in harmony but have no obligations toward each other. Secondly, Russians have assumed that all "big ideas" came from Moscow. Now we have something - the people demanding democracy and taking control - that originated in Ukraine, and Russians are finding this comedown hard to take.

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