Analysts predict win for incumbent in second-round voting
President Leonid Kuchma captured more than 36 percent of the vote in the first round of Ukraine’s presidential elections on Oct. 31 and will face Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko in a runoff election on Nov. 14.
Most analysts give the nod to Kuchma to win the runoff, but caution that the vote is difficult to call due to the strong overall showing by leftist candidates in the first round.
Symonenko surprised analysts by capturing more than 22 percent of the vote in the first round. Two other left-leaning candidates, Socialist Party head Oleksandr Moroz and radical leftist Natalia Vitrenko, finished third and fourth respectively, both garnering about 11 percent of the vote.
Ukraine’s Central Election Commission was to announce the official vote count on Thursday Nov. 4, but the final figures were expected to only marginally differ from those already released. Some 70 percent of Ukraine’s eligible voters, or about 25 million cast their ballots.
Many compared the results of the voting to the 1996 presidential election in Russia, where President Boris Yeltsin ended up in a runoff against Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. Yeltsin beat his rival handily in the runoff.
That scenario could repeat itself in Ukraine. At least that is what Kuchma’s campaigners are banking on.
‘Kuchma will win with an even greater gap between him and his rival than in 1994,’ said Dmytro Tabachnyk, deputy chief of Kuchma’s electoral headquarters, at a press conference on Nov. 1.
Tabachnyk presided over Kuchma’s 1994 election campaign, when the 61-year-old former missile plant director beat incumbent Leonid Kravchuk in the runoff, collecting 52.2 percent of the vote. Kravchuk, who outdid Kuchma in the first round, got a disappointing 45.1 percent.
Kuchma’s campaign team was the first among those in the race to convene a press conference the morning after the Oct. 31 vote. Kuchma’s victory was trumpeted as a sign of the wide public support for the incumbent’s ‘course of reform.’
‘Regardless of all the hardships, the course of our president for statehood, economic changes and reform has won,’ Tabachnyk said.
But some analysts believe that Kuchma’s solid lead in the first round will not ensure victory on Nov. 14, especially if all of Vitrenko’s voters and a major part of Moroz’s voters chose to support Symonenko. Those three combined received more than 45 percent of the votes in the first round.
‘Symonenko has certain advantages to start with, but they will only work if his campaign is open and public and he takes some serious decisions as to creating political coalitions,’ said Mykola Tomenko, director of the Institute of Politics, an independent think tank, on Nov. 3.
Indications are that Symonenko is already busy trying to hammer out agreements with his former rivals. By the night of Nov. 1, Symonenko had already started negotiations with Moroz, centrist Yevhen Marchuk – who placed fifth with 8 percent of the vote – and hard-line parliament speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko. Tkachenko had withdrawn from the first round of elections in favor of Symonenko, reportedly on the promise of a seat in the new government.
‘It’s realistic to [beat Kuchma] if we … unite opposition forces to counter the regime,’ Symonenko told a press conference on Nov. 1. ‘We are expecting a serious and difficult fight.’
Moroz was the first to announce Nov. 2 that he would support Symonenko in the run off, which he dubbed ‘the only chance to oust Kuchma and his entourage.’
Moroz said the politicians were trying to create a coalition and sign an agreement that would limit the presidential powers in case Symonenko came to power.
The agreement also aims at creating a scheme for dividing government posts among coalition members.
The agreement was aimed at drawing centrist votes and showing that a Communist in power wouldn’t be as bad as many people think, especially if he teams up with centrist politicians.
Nevertheless, such an agreement had not been signed by the time the Post went to press. Some analysts noted the failure to swiftly ink an agreement as evidence that Symonenko’s intention to win the election didn’t go any further than declarations.
‘I don’t see any basis for saying that Symonenko is ready to fight to the end,’ said Tomenko. ‘If he really wanted to win, the agreement would be signed on the first day.’
Also, many analysts hoped that Symonenko would consider withdrawing his candidacy in favor of Moroz, who is widely believed to have a better chance to beat Kuchma.
Under the presidential election law, the final deadline for withdrawal is seven days before the election, or Nov. 7. If one of the two presidential finalists withdraw, the third-place finisher from the first round – in this case Moroz – enters the run off. Symonenko denied any intentions to drop out of the race.
‘I think that the voters have already made their choice and gave twice as many votes for the program of the Communist party than for Moroz’s program,’ he said.
At the same time, analysts and media speculated that Symonenko still has a good chance to win because Kuchma’s voters could get carried away by the expectation of his easy victory in the first round and fail to show up in sufficient numbers at the polls.
‘There’s a threat that the democratically oriented portion of the electorate, which includes young people and people from large cities, will not come to vote,’ said Ilko Kucheriv, head of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a Western-financed, non-governmental organization.
Symonenko is unlikely to have such a problem with his voters. Leftist voters in Ukraine, like their counterparts in Russia, have developed a reputation as being the voters most likely to show up at the polls on election day. That has allowed the Communist Party in both countries to perform strongly in nationwide elections in recent years.
