Editor's Note: See related story headlined "Extreme Choices: Svoboda plays nationalist card."
Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the ring-wing Svoboda Party, first became widely known in the summer of 2004. During a gathering in the Carpathians, Tyahynbok praised former Ukrainian Insurgent Army soldiers for fighting with Russians, Germans, Jews and other scum that wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.”
In the
eight years since, Tyahnybok has fashioned a political movement – especially
popular in western Ukraine – that has a decent shot of getting into parliament
for the first time as a political party.
After the
2004 speech, however, Tyahnybok was ostracized and kicked out of Viktor
Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine faction as a lawmaker from 2002-2006.
In a 2010
interview with Focus news magazine, said he did not see anything wrong with the
speech. But he has, nonetheless, toned down his political rhetoric. He also
said he’s not anti-Semitic or xenophobic, but some of his detractors still have
their doubts.
His party
allies promote the higher status of Ukrainians in Ukraine. Some fear this is a
code word for supremacy over other ethnic groups.
Iryna
Farion, a prominent Svoboda Party member, became famous when during her visit
to a kindergarten in early 2010 in western Ukraine’s Lviv she told several
small kids to go to Russia as their names sounded too Russian for her.
Earlier in
February Yuriy Syrotyuk, a senior member of Svoboda Party, made racist comment
regarding Ukrainian singer Gaitana, who was born to a Ukrainian mother and a
Congolese father. He said that Gaitana was not a good choice for the Eurovision
song contest, which took in May, because she due to her ethnic background “is
not an organic representative of the Ukrainian culture.” Never the less he
praised her a “great singer.”
Svoboda Party,
which used to be called Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine before it was
renamed in 2004 to its current name, want to open former KGB archives in
Ukraine and introduce proportional ethnic representation in parliament to
upgrade the status of ethnic Ukrainians in the country.
It stands
in strong opposition to President Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola
Azarov. The party promises to rescind pension reform and the tax code if they
get into in the parliamentary elections scheduled for Oct. 28.
According
to some recent polls, Svoboda has a fair chance of passing 5 percent threshold
needed to get into the Verkhovna Rada on party lists. Several Svoboda
candidates in single-mandate constituencies also have a chance to be elected to
the legislature.
The party
offers to oust the government of Prime Minister Mykoa Azarov and cancel a controversial
language law that upgrades the status of the Russian language. The party also
wants to repeal other laws adopted in the last two and a half years by a pro-presidential
majority in the parliament, such as the April 2010 measure to allow the Russian
Black Sea Fleet to remain in Crimea until 2042.
Svoboda has
for years been campaigning on glorifying OUN-UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
that took up arms during World War II and into the 1950s to fight against the Soviets
for Ukraine’s national independence. This promotion of Ukrainian nationalism is
opposed in the eastern part of the country, where many regard the Soviet Red
Army’s victory as sacred and view UPA and the OUN led by Stepan Bandera as Nazi
sympathizers.
Tyahnybok said
he would favor electing all 450 members of parliament through open party lists
– as opposed to the half-district, half-party list system of the Oct. 28 vote.
He also wants to ban all tobacco and alcohol advertisements.
Kyiv
Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected]
