Dogmatic, combative leftist could be Ukraine's next president
ction, Ukraine will soon become the first former communist country to be led by a woman.
The catch is, she would set the country on a course back to state control over everything and absolute isolation from the West.
Natalia Vitrenko, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, is Ukraine's most unpredictable and extreme politician. For the past two months she has had the highest popularity ratings of all probable presidential candidates.
According to the latest monthly nationwide opinion poll by Socis-Gallup, 19 percent of eligible Ukrainian voters are ready to cast their ballots for Vitrenko, up from 6 percent when the poll was started last September.
President Leonid Kuchma, who was still slightly ahead of Vitrenko in the February Socis-Gallup poll, took second place in the March and April polls, although by the bare margin of 2 percentage points.
Another somewhat less credible poll by the state Institute of Social Studies showed Kuchma still leading in March but falling well behind Vitrenko this month, with Vitrenko scoring 18 percent support to Kuchma's 11 percent.
The other leading leftists who were previously thought to be Kuchma's main rivals, Socialist Oleksandr Moroz and Communist Petro Symonenko, have been hovering around the 8 percent to 12 percent support range.
Vitrenko's party colleague, Volodymyr Marchenko, said Vitrenko deserves an even higher rating.
'She deserves 80 or 90 percent support; that would really reflect what she is worth,' he said.
In an April 20 interview, Vitrenko said her popularity was a result of her refusal to betray her ideals.
'If you stand for your ideas honestly and successively, people start to respect you,' she said. 'Even if they disagree with your views.'
Unlike many of her fellow deputies in parliament, Vitrenko and her colleagues have traveled the country continuously since they were elected in March 1998 to talk to the public and present their program for reversing Ukraine's post-Soviet economic debacle.
Vitrenko, who calls herself 'a true Marxist,' believes the remedies are more state regulation and planning and an immediate end to cooperation with the International Monetary Fund.
Vitrenko takes the microphone in parliament at every opportunity to comment on current issues and often submits bills for debate. Ukraine's parliament sessions are broadcast live on the main national radio channel.
Many politicians and analysts, however, believe there is more to Vitrenko's success than enthusiasm and self-promotion. They say President Leonid Kuchma's administration is tacitly supporting Vitrenko in order to split the leftist vote and give Kuchma a challenger he can beat.
Moroz, who has reasons to be jealous of Vitrenko's popularity, told the Interfax news agency in mid-April that she receives 'serious support from those in power.'
Mykola Tomenko, director of the independent Institute of Politics, concurred. He said one of the main mechanisms is the control over venues exercised by provincial administrators. Tomenko said each oblast has a 'black list' of people who are not allowed to rent state-owned buildings for meetings.
'Moroz is on all of the [black lists] in all of the oblasts, Symonenko is on some, and Vitrenko is on none,' Tomenko said.
Unlike her leftist rivals, Vitrenko regularly appears on national television and in national newspapers, and she is not always given negative coverage.
Vitrenko, however, says she also has problems renting venues but doesn't complain about it. She added that she isn't traveling very much yet because the campaign season hasn't started.
'We officially rent cinemas, pay for them, and use them for our meetings,' she said.
The Progressive Socialist Party is due to decide at a congress sometime in May whether to nominate Vitrenko or back some other presidential candidate. The decision could depend on whether the Communist and Socialist parties agree to front a united candidate.
Vitrenko gets along with no other party leader well but is especially scornful of Moroz. She was a major figure in Moroz's Socialists in the early '90s but later split with him over his movement away from Marxist orthodoxy.
Vitrenko calls Moroz 'the main anti-socialist and anti-communist' and a 'provocateur' in the leftist ranks. She said at a press conference after an April 10 party congress that she will not sit at the same negotiating table as Moroz.
Vitrenk also isn't particularly complimentary of Symonenko or the Peasant Party's Oleksandr Tkachenko. She says all of Ukraine's leftist leaders besides her have given up their Marxist views and are only interested in power.
'Tkachenko is an oligarch, Moroz is an oligarch's man, and Symonenko is a fake who doesn't know what he stands for,' she said in the recent interview.
Most analysts predict the Progressive Socialists will nominate Vitrenko and she suggested the same.
'We are waiting for [the leftist leaders] to show their true selves, and for people to understand who they are,' she said.
The other leftists are no less critical towards Vitrenko, and often call her a 'Ukrainian Zhirinovsky' and a 'Trojan horse' in the leftist camp.
All four leftist leaders, including Tkachenko, are believed to have presidential ambitions, but so far only Moroz has officially announced that he will seek the presidency.
Tomenko said Vitrenko is unlikely to be elected president unless she draws support from other leftists.
'If Vitrenko only runs from her party, she will have a problem winning in the second round,' he said. Vitrenko believes she is on the winning side, however.
'The honest workers who have figured out who is who in this country will have to vote for me,' she said.
