PDP cashing in on Rukh's troubles
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The young taxi driver was asking about the preeminent nationalist party's viability elsewhere in the country. But even here, in its western Ukrainian birthplace and stronghold, Rukh is no longer the force that it once was. As if to underline the point, when the cab came to a stop, Rukh's regional headquarters wasn't where it used to be. It took a while to track down the new location. Lviv has been ruled in this century from Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow and Kyiv, and always managed to march to its own beat. This campaign is no exception, with national politics superceded by local considerations as quirky as the old city's Hapsburg architecture.
Rukh has been dominant here since 1994, when its candidate, Vasyl Kuybida, was elected the city's mayor, and its decline here is directly related to voters' disillusionment with the ruling party.
The most popular alternative is, of all things, the People's Democratic Party, which elsewhere in Ukraine is burdened with the label of 'the party of power.' Here, though, the PDP consists not of ex-Soviet apparatchiks but of a 'New Wave' of moderate nationalists who organized two years ago to challenge Rukh.
Unlike Rukh's leadership, the liberals of this New Wave did not spend time in gulags for defending Ukrainian nationalism under Soviet rule. And though they are patriots in good standing as fluent in the national language as their elders, they steer clear of linguistic and cultural controversies that have eroded Rukh's support both here and nationwide.
'People want real change, not just slogans about independence and the Ukrainian language,' said Andry Stetskiv who heads PDP's Lviv branch secretariat. Concerts, festivals and benefits sponsored by the PDP have made the party at least as popular as Rukh, giving it 15 percent of the vote in a recent survey of Lviv residents by the local office of the Socis-Gallup polling firm. 'We never organize political rallies, we focus on specifics, and this is why people support us,' said Stetskiv.
Rukh, which still boasts a 12,000-strong organization that is this region's largest, has gotten the message, and expects to do well in the March 29 elections. 'We are breaking the stereotype of Rukh as a party that waves Ukrainian national flags and pronounces slogans,' said Borys Korpan, deputy chairman of the party's Lviv branch. 'We are working to turn Rukh into a capable organization with people who work actively and productively.'
Lviv's Rukh and PDP branches alike are trying hard to distance themselves from their national standard-bearers. Infighting within Rukh's national organization, its ambiguous relationship with the government it ostensibly opposes and increasingly personal rule by Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil have pushed up the proportion of Lviv residents who completely distrust the old dissident to 36 percent, an all time high, according to Socis-Gallup figures. But Kuybida is still an electoral asset because his city is comparatively well managed, and so Rukh has tied its name to his.
The PDP has even more of an incentive to promote its local heroes.
Voters learning about the party from its campaign literature and posters in Lviv would never know that Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko tops its national ticket, followed by such figures as PDP Chairman and Vinnytsya Region Adminstration Chief Anatoly Matvienko, Minister of the Cabinet Anatoly Tolstoukhov and other high government officials. Instead, it is the local names that dominate. 'You can imagine what would happen if they started publicizing here the name of Matvienko, who was Ukrainian Komsomol [Communist youth organization] leader in Soviet times,' said Arsen Koval, an analyst with the Geneza political studies center in Lviv.
The local PDP is genuinely autonomous, its leaders more closely associated with such liberals as former Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Pynzenyk and Parliament Deputy Ihor Yukhnovsky than with powerbrokers like Matvienko. Its tie-up with Pustovoitenko and Matvienko is likely just a tactical alliance that will boost the PDP's nationwide vote tally in exchange for the party's help in local election districts. But even former communists are a liability in rabidly anti-communist Lviv, so guilt by association remains a danger.
Local party activists are proving their independence from national leaders with deeds rather than just words. Although Rukh and the PDP are rivals in the nationwide campaign, their Lviv branches have formed a united front for the municipal elections.
Their bloc, Our City, is built on longstanding personal ties between the two parties' local leaders. It expects to grab a majority of City Council seats and implement a joint program for refurbishing Lviv's numerous historical sites and attracting foreign investment.
'One reason [for cooperation] is that we agree on many issues, but we also need to work jointly to prevent extreme nationalists from taking power,' said Stetskiv. Far-right parties like the National Front bloc and the Social National Party of Ukraine are still an influential force in the Lviv Region, though slogans such as 'Ukraine for Ukrainians' limit their base of support. According to Geneza's estimates, these parties combined can count on about a third as many votes as Rukh, mainly from student radicals and older victims of Soviet repression. The liberal Reforms and Order party can count on some local support because its leader, Pynzenyk, used to teach economics at Lviv University. For other parties such as Social Democrats, Liberals and others, the city is a lost cause.
'The cultural conservatism of western Ukrainians will not allow these parties to become strong here,' said Koval. 'Lviv's political market has already been divvied up.' Local public opinion surveys put the proportion of undecided voters at 20 percent, half the nationwide figure. Lviv's bloody history has taught its citizens to pay attention to differences of ideology. And the city's exposure to party politics dates back to the Hapsburg empire's short-lived parliament.
'Acceptance of parties in Lviv has always been rather strong,' said Koval. 'While people elsewhere in Ukraine vote for personalities, voters in Lviv also tend to differentiate between political parties.'
Outsiders who try to barge in often end up with an egg on their faces, if not a rotten vegetable of the sort recently hurled by nationalist protesters to disrupt appearances by left-wing leaders.
Thus former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko's Hromada party destroyed what little chance it might have had in the largely Greek Catholic Lviv when it tried to advertise its religious conviction. The desk calendars it was distributing promoted the splinter of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church loyal to the Moscow Patriarchy. Outsiders backed by the patronage of the central government have fared better, especially in the countryside surrounding the city.
Before last year, hardly anyone in the Lviv Region had heard of the Agrarian Party of Ukraine or of an Agriculture Ministry bureaucrat named Mykhaylo Hlady. Then a foreign-adoption scandal implicating a regional administration official forced nationalist regional boss Mykhailo Horyn from office, and President Leonid Kuchma replaced him with Hlady.
Soon thereafter, all key positions in the regional administration were filled by Agrarian Party members and the local print media saw the birth of a new weekly competitor, Ukrainsky Shlyakh, edited by the wife of a Hlady deputy. And the local state-owned TV station, whose broadcasts coincidentally pre-empt Russia's popular news show Vremya, unambiguously suggests that the Agrarian Party is the best bet among the 30 political parties contesting the parliamentary elections.
Some local observers are worried that the Agrarian Party won't draw the line at propaganda. The local elections committee has already made independent monitoring of the vote count harder by dividing each of the eight single-candidate parliamentary constituencies into tiny voting precincts.
While everyone expected it to set up about a 1,000 precincts throughout the region with approximately 2,000 voters in each, the elections committee unexpectedly came up with over 2,000 precincts, some containing no more than 200 voters.
'The logic is simple: you cannot send an observer to every small precinct, and election results there can easily be falsified,' said Roman Koshovy of the Lviv branch of the Ukrainian Voters' Committee, a nonpartisan election-monitoring group.
The fear is that such gerrymandering will play into the hands of regional administration bosses who are running in rural districts as far removed as possible from urbane Lviv. For example, Hlady aide Orest Furdychko is a candidate in the provincial district of Turky, an area comprised of small villages.
But the Agrarian Party's major competitors are not ready to concede the countryside. 'We see and feel their attempts to exert administrative influence in the region, but it's not going to be decisive,' said Rukh's Korpan. 'The competition is more or less civilized so far.'
