From campaign billboards, imprisoned Ukrainian war hero Nadiya Savchenko, tells Ukrainians "not to give up!" and that "Ukraine can prevail!"
Savchenko, held by Russian authorities on
what many believe are trumped-up allegations of involvement in the murder of
two Russian journalists, is No. 1 on the Batkivshchyna party list for the Oct. 26 parliamentary election. She was captured
by Kremlin-backed separatists on June 17.
She is followed on the ticket by Yulia
Tymoshenko, another woman who also knows something about being in prison. The
former prime minister has been imprisoned twice, once during ex-President
Leonid Kuchma’s era and the second time for more than two years under overthrown
President Viktor Yanukovych.
Tymosheno was released the same day that Yanukovych
fled power on Feb. 22 and soon restarted her political career. She finished with
only 12.8 percent of the vote in the May 25 presidential election against Petro
Poroshenko.
But – despite major defections – she is poised to easily pass the 5 percent threshold to get into the new parliament.
Batkivshchyna, or Fatherland, is the
only major party with women in the top two spots, but it is considered neither a “women’s” nor a “feminist” party. A more plausible explanation is that Tymoshenko,
faced with the defections of high-level supporters to other blocs, decided that
she needed a war hero on top of the ticket to pull in votes.
“Nadiya is number one because they
decided to use the name of a hero and number two is Tymoshenko. The fact that
the first two names on the list are women says nothing about the rights of
women and feminism in Ukrainian politics,” said Anne Hutsol co-founder of the
feminist protest group FEMEN.
Savchenko
emerged as No. 1 after political infighting prompted Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatsenyuk and Verkhovna Rada speaker Oleksandr Turchynov, a former deputy prime
minister under Tymoshenko, to break with Batkivshchyna and found their own
party, the People’s Front.
Ukrainian political analyst Taras
Berezovets said that Tymoshenko, whose bloc in parliament has 86 out of 450
seats, is destined to lose strength after the Oct. 26 vote.
Berezovets thinks Tymoshenko had
problems with “strong personalities on the list, including Oleksandr Turchynov
and Aseniy Yatsenyuk.” The exit of Yatsenyuk and Turchynov, who led the party
during Tymoshenko’s imprisonment, has left the party with a shortage of prominent
politicians.
Despite
the exodus, however, a poll conducted by the consulting firm GfK-Ukraine from
Sep. 24 to Oct. 5 shows Batkivshchyna as the second largest party in the next
parliament. It also shows hers as the only party returning from the current parliament, after
Yanukovych’s former ruling Party of Regions decided not to run. Also, the Communist
Party is polling under the 5 percent threshold required for entering
parliament. Many former Yanukovych allies are, however, running as the
Opposition Bloc, also polling below the 5 percent threshold.
Other polls show the Batkivshchyna party as rising recently to 8.5 percent in the standings.
The fact that the two other best
performing parties in the polls, the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko and Oleh
Lyashko’s Radical Party, were founded in 2014 and 2010, respectively, allows
Batkivshchyna to take advantage of the grassroots structure that the new parties
don’t have.
“Batkivshchyna
is one of the oldest Ukrainian parties. It is one of the most stable and
strongest parties concerning the number of regional offices and is one of the
most developed political projects in Ukraine. Along with Party of the Regions, Batkivshchyna
has the most serious structure,” said Berezovets.
Batkivshchyna
member of parliament Oleksandra Kuzhel puts it more bluntly. “There aren’t any
other parties. The rest are lists and not parties,” Kuzhel said.
The
schism created by Yatsenyuk, Turchynov and others leaving the Batkivshchyna party
has created some hard feelings that will have to be addressed as the GfK-Ukraine poll shows the People’s Front also
entering parliament.
Nadiya
Savchenko is not the only Savchenko running in the parliamentary election on
the Batkivshchyna label. Her sister Vira is running in district #98 in Kyiv Oblast
Vira chose which party list her sister
would run on, saying that Nadiya always considered Tymoshenko to be a strong and
confrontational politician. “She is a fighter. A lot of people call her a man
in a skirt,” said Vira.
Vira,
however, says neither she nor her sister consider themselves to be feminists. They
more identify with the military, where theoretically gender is irrelevant and
everyone is equal. That position is consistent with that of of Batkivshchyna,
which makes no mention of gender equality or women’s issues in its election
manifesto.
Despite
the presence of two women at the top of the ticket, only 31 percent of the
candidates on the Batkivshchyna party list are women, only slightly above the legally
mandated minimum of 30 percent. The statistic only looks better compared with
the Radical Party, where women only make up 28 percent of the party list, and the
Bloc of Poroshenko, where women make up 18 percent of the list.
Representation
of women in Ukrainian politics continues to be a problem.
The 2013 Global Gender Gap Report
published by the World Economic Forum ranked 119 out of 136 countries for
political empowerment. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union database
of Women in Parliaments, only 9.73 percent of deputies in Ukraine’s current
parliament are women.
Nonetheless,
Nadiya Savchenko is seen as a positive role model.
“We have a woman who is doing work
typical for a man, like being a pilot,” said Tamara Martsenyuk, associate professor
of Sociology at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy.
However, FEMEN’S Hutsol is concerned
that issues of gender equality are being cast aside.
“No
one talks about women and their problems unfortunately. And the current
strengthening of nationalist parties and structures means that feminism will be
even less represented because feminism and nationalism are completely
irreconcilable. Today, because of the war, women’s rights is in in 20th or 30th
place after all the other problems,” Hutsol said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Ian Bateson can be followed on Twitter @ianbateson.
