Sergiy Tigipko, leader of the Strong Ukraine party who later supported ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, will need a strong turnout among his supporters to get into parliament. According to one recent poll, the former deputy prime minister’s party stands at 5.6 percent support, barely about the 5 percent threshold.
Supporters of Tigipko have reason for hope. The same poll that gave him 5.6 percent support also found that nearly one third of voters had not made up their minds yet. The poll, conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, was taken on Oct. 9-18.
The turnout in Ukraine’s south and war-torn Donbas, areas traditionally supportive of 2010 presidential candidate Tigipko, is expected to be lower than usual.
Despite that, Tigipko is optimistic ahead of the Oct. 26 vote.
“I will fight, first of all, for a thinking, calm voter whose beliefs are the same as mine – economic pragmatism, need to establish peace, centrist position,” Tigipko said in an Oct. 15 interview with glavcom.ua news site. “My voter won’t support radicals from this or that side.”
If elected, it will be Tigipko’s fourth time in parliament, but his first as a leader of his own party on the ballot.
In his political career, Tigipko, 54, had several peaks. Soon after serving as economy minister under ex-President Leonid Kuchma, Tigipko was appointed head of the National Bank. During the 2004 presidential race Tigipko headed headquarters of candidate Viktor Yanukovych, the then-prime minister supported by Kuchma. After the rigged presidential election and Orange Revolution which brought Yanukovych’s rival Viktor Yushchenko to power, Tigipko left public politics and managed the financial and industrial group TAS that he founded.
Tigipko returned to big politics to take part in the 2010 presidential campaign. He was considered a new face and finished third after Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko, with 13 percent of the vote. Instead of going into the opposition against Yanukovych, who presided over the jailing of Tymoshenko on trumped-up political charges for more than two years, Tigipko became vice prime minister and minister for social policy in the government of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov. He introduced pension changes that gradually increased the age of retirement in Ukraine in a nation that pays a much higher percentage of its gross domestic product to social payments than many other nations.
During the last parliamentary elections in 2012, Tigipko was running as number three on the Party of Regions party list. He became deputy head of the Party of Regions but did not enter the new government.
As a member of ruling majority, Tigipko voted for the Jan. 16 “dictator laws,” which limited freedom of speech and assembly and therefore sparked a new wave of uprisings and as a result numerous casualties among EuroMaidan protesters in Kyiv last winter.
Tigipko and a group of deputies that were oriented with him in the parliament were expected to join pro-Maidan forces. But during the crucial vote on Feb. 20 to condemn violence against protesters which marked the beginning of new majority, Tigipko did not show up in the session hall. He left the Party of Regions faction only on April 8, after Yanukovych had long-since fled and Russia had formally annexed Crimea.
After the conflict inside the Party of Regions became more and more evident, Tigipko decided to renew his party Strong Ukraine and run for the parliament as its leader.
“That part of Regions linked with (Rinat) Akhmetov, (Dmytro) Firtash, (Serhiy) Lyovochkin and even some connected with (Viktor Medvedchuk) united now in the Oppositional Bloc,” explained Volodymyr Fesenko, head of Penta Center for Applied Political Studies. “While another one, I would say, moderate group of deputies… found Tigipko as an appropriate choice.”
According to Fesenko, Tigipko’s party list consists of candidates of three categories. The core team are people who were with Tigipko from the very beginning and helped setting up his party. A representative of this group is Svitlana Fabrykant, current deputy and number three on his party list.
The second group includes representatives of the old regime, including ex-members of the Party of Regions who had conflicts with the former ruling party and don’t want to be associated with it. Among them are Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy, deputy prime minister under Yanukovych and number two in the list, and Sviatoslav Piskun, former prosecutor general, now running as number 16.
“They are not revolutionaries,” Fesenko describes this part of Tigipko’s team. “They are pragmatics who can adjust to the authorities, but don’t like conflicts with the authorities. If they are in opposition then this is a constructive opposition.”
The third part of Strong Ukraine Party list consists of businesspeople who like Tigipko’s pragmatism and believe that he will protect their economic interests. It includes Ihor Mazepa, general director at Concord Capital, an investment company, and number 5 on the list.
Economic issues were always a core part of Tigipko’s agenda.
In the program of Strong Ukraine party published on the Central Election Commission website, one may read that priorities of his party, apart for real peace and unity of the country, are economic renovation and social standards for Ukrainian citizens. Tigipko stands for economic freedom and improving of business climate in Ukraine. At the same time he wants that Ukrainian car building and metallurgy plants and agricultural companies were guaranteed state procurements. He believes also that to protect local producers Ukraine’s market should be closed for imported goods up to 6 months. Ukraine has to negotiate with European Union, U.S. and other countries in order that they open their markets for Ukrainian goods in order to compensate the cut of the Russian market.
When it is not about economics, Tigipko seems to be more flexible.
When running for the president during the May 25 election, Tigipko promised to make Russian language a second state language apart for Ukrainian. In the parliament campaign he mentions only that the central government should support development of Ukrainian culture, language and history, while local authorities should be given the right to define principles of language and cultural policies taking everyone into account.
In his presidential campaign, Tigipko said that to save the country from collapse and civil war all illegal military groups, which might included volunteer battalions fighting to defend the nation against Russia’s war in the Donbas, should be banned. After that a professional contract army should be established.
In his agenda for parliament he talks about military reform by creating a professional army which can resist any foreign aggression, military doctrine.
For his billboards, Tigipko has chosen patriotic yellow, instead of blue, the color associated with the former ruling Party of Regions. “Stronger together!” is what his advertising now says.
Oksana Lyachynska is a Kyiv Post staff writer.
