KHARKIV, Ukraine -- In his attempt get re-elected as Kharkiv mayor on Oct. 25, Hennady Kernes has mobilized all the might of the city’s municipal services for his campaign.
City workers clean the streets, fix benches and elevators, saying they
do it on behalf of the Revival (Vidrodzhennia) party that Kernes leads. The
yard workers regularly tear away the placards of Kernes’s rivals and openly
campaign for him.
Violations of election law aside, polls show nearly half the residents
support Kernes, 56, and his party. If those polls translate into support, this
would be a big endorsement coming from Ukraine’s second-largest city –with 1.5
million residents – and major industrial hub.
Kernes’s 49 percent and his party’s 40 percent put him far ahead of his 10
competitors, according to a poll conducted in early October by the Kyiv-based
Situations Modeling Agency.
Waiting for a city bus with Revival painted on it, Eleonora Avramishyn,
a 52-year-old pensioner, says she doesn’t care that the political advertisement
on a municipal transport vehicle violates election rules. What matters to her
is that Kernes does a lot for the city. “Thanks to him, we, the pensioners, may
use public transport for free, thanks to him our yards are clean and our roofs
are fixed,” she said.
Under five years of Kernes’s management, which included getting the city
ready to co-host the 2012 European soccer championship, the local government
has built or reconstructed numerous roads, squares, and parks.
Critics say that corruption often
accompanied the renovations.
“There are five layers of asphalt on Gagarin Avenue instead of just two
needed,” said businessman and former deputy head of Kharkiv Oblast
Administration Yuri Sapronov, another candidate for Kharkiv mayor. “And the
money spent for the additional three layers, which were embezzled from the city
budget, could have been spent for the renovation of some 500 yards in Kharkiv.”
Sapronov, 52, says that for one square meter of asphalt or roof layer
the Kharkiv authorities pay up to 40 percent more than in most other Ukrainian
cities. He adds that the companies that win in city tenders usually “lead
directly or indirectly to Hennady Kernes.”
Kernes and his party refused to comment for this story.
He became the city’s mayor as a vehement ally of the ousted President
Viktor Yanukovych. In 2014, he was often accused of hiring thugs – “titushkis”
– to attack EuroMaidan protesters. But after Yanukovych fled to Russia, Kernes
did a swift about-face: He announced loyalty to the new authorities and said he
was just a “prisoner of the system.”
Now Kernes heads the local list of the Revival party, which incorporates
a number of former Yanukovych allies.
In March, prosecutors announced a criminal probe against Kernes and two
his bodyguards, accusing them of kidnapping and torturing EuroMaidan activists.
The court hearing on this case is now under way in Poltava.
In April 2014, Kernes survived an assassination attempt during a bicycle
ride, which bound him to a wheelchair.
Despite all his misfortunes, a first-round victory is within reach for
Kernes if he gets more than 50 percent of the votes. Sapronov is a distant
second with just 8 percent support in polls.
Kharkiv residents walk by the campaign tents near the subway station on Oct. 15.
Yulia Bidenko, a doctor of political science at Kazarin Kharkiv National
University, says that Kernes has successfully placated his opponents, silenced
independent media and forced local businesspeople to cooperate with him. Those
who disagreed could have “their cars burned or their property damaged,”
she says.
Oleksandr Feldman, an influential Kharkiv businessman, surprised many by
not running for mayor. “As a businessman he probably decided to compromise and
avoid the conflicts,” Bidenko explains.
Still Feldman, who leads a regional branch of Our Land (Nash Kray) party,
which also includes many former Yanukovych allies, competes with Kernes’ party
in the city council race. Kharkiv’s budget of Hr 6.5 million, or $300 million,
gives power to members of the city council, Bidenko says.
Apart from Revival, the parties that are likely to pass the 5 percent
threshold for election include Feldman’s Our Land (8.5 percent), Samopomich
(7.6 percent) and President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, which also includes some
former Yanukovych’s allies (4.5 percent).
Surprisingly, a direct successor of Yanukovych’s party Opposition Bloc,
led by Mykhailo Dobkin, a former governor of Kharkiv Oblast, a lawmaker and
Kernes’s old friend, decided not to run city council seats. Bidenko believes
Dobkin agreed not to take votes from the Revival party.
Instead, the Opposition Bloc has already sparked a country-wide scandal
after the Kharkiv Oblast election commission refused three times to register
the party for elections in the region for violating election procedures. By Oct.
18, the Central Election Commission had registered 105 candidates of the party
but without its leader Dobkin.
In the oblast council race, Kernes’s party has strong competition from
Poroshenko’s bloc, which uses regional officials to campaign for it the same
way that Kernes does at the municipal level, Bidenko says.
At the place of the toppled Vladimir Lenin’s statue on the city’s main
square there is a billboard with the portraits of 18 Kharkiv residents who were
killed during the EuroMaidan protests and Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Bidenko forecasts a voter turnout of no more than 35 percent because of
apathy, exhaustion and distrust of politicians in a city that has lived in fear
of a Russian military invasion for more than a year. “Intellectuals and active
youth are now trying to distance themselves from politics,” Bidenko says.
This has led major competitors to compete for votes with bribes, fraud
and dirty public relations.
Activists of the Opora election watchdog found that Yevhen Ruchka, a top
manager at a local pharmaceutical company and a city council candidate from
Poroshenko’s party, bribed voters, offering them free medical kits.
“The police opened an investigation based on our complaint,” said
Viktoriya Shevchuk, head of Opora’s Kharkiv.
The most disturbing one was the case of Anatoliy Rodzinsky, a mayoral
candidate and vehement critic of Kernes, who was beaten by unknown attackers on
Oct. 1. Rodzinsky accused Kernes of ordering the attack, which the incumbent
mayor denied.
Sapronov says all his billboards in Kharkiv have been illegally removed
and replaced by ones supporting Kernes.
Feldman wants international observers to closely monitor city elections
as he fears “mass falsifications” on Oct. 25.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
