Candidates hoping to ride their election platform to victory in the upcoming presidential election better think again. This year, it’s all about image.
Most voters, disillusioned by what they view as an endless stream of broken promises by politicians since Ukraine became independent, say that they could care less about the platforms of the various candidates.
‘They’re all crooks and only think about themselves, but I’ll choose the one who talks the least and does something for the people,’ said Mykola Habibulin, a security guard at a building on vul. Lesya Ukrainka. ‘I don’t even know what kind of programs they all have.’
He added that, to deserve his vote, a candidate must have a chance of winning the election, as well.
Sociological data shows that a good few million Ukrainians share Habibulin’s views.
According to two different polls by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and International Foundation for Election Systems conducted over this summer, people say that the most important factor in judging a candidate is that candidate’s readiness to represent and defend the interests of common people.
The second most important factor, the polls found, is personal qualities, such as honesty and decency. Candidate platforms came in a distant third.
As a matter of fact, according to the IFES poll, almost half of the people see no clear difference in the platforms of the various candidates.
‘All the candidates are very attentive to what the electorate expects, and everyone is trying to find the formula that will best fit their expectations,’ said Ilko Kucheriv, head of Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a non-governmental organization that promotes fair elections. But all of them are trying to do it in completely different ways, [Communist Petro] Symonenko does it differently from [Rukh-1 leader Hennady] Udovenko.’
Indeed, Udovenko’s television ads advertise him as ‘a candidate for all Ukrainians,’ of whom there are ’52 million.’
Symonenko, on the other hand, has no TV ads, because they’re too much of a capitalist invention and would only hurt the image he’s trying to promote. At the same time, the bitter rhetoric of his public speeches and the fact that he is a Communist promote his efforts to mold himself into the ideal people’s candidate.
Green leader Vitaly Kononov also tries to fashion himself as a man of the people. He runs a simple ad on TV that in which he shows off the multi-storied building where he lives and travels to work by metro.
Parliament speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko advertises himself both on TV and in posters as ‘A People’s President.’ Tkachenko, along with his colleagues from the Kaniv-4 group of candidates, tries to portray himself as a fierce fighter of corruption and a defender of the people’s interests.
Tkachenko even devoted his entire free 10-minute clip on national channel UT-1 to exposing the incumbent president’s friends and naming their foreign bank accounts. He promised that things would change if he is elected.
Moroz’s team exploits his nice-guy image also. The very first ad he ran on television had the slogan, ‘Let’s elect the honest power,’ and the latest one – done as a cartoon – shows him freezing out a swarm of bureaucrats who are flying over a happy Ukrainian village and killing its happy life. The ad plays on the word Moroz, which means ‘Frost’ in both Ukrainian and Russian.
With such a great choice of candidates, not all voters rely on image alone to make their choice.
‘People choose a president taking into consideration both political platforms and personal qualities,’ Kucheriv said.
Those platforms often leave little to go on, however. Published and distributed by the Central Election Commissions all over the country, they tend to be restrained, revealing little about the actual intentions of the candidates.
One reason for that, experts say, is that they’re more designed to please as much of the electorate as possible rather than reveal a candidate’s real political stance.
For example, to cater to the pro-Russian, densely populated eastern and southern regions of the country, six candidates out of 15 said in their platforms that Russia and Belarus have to become Ukraine’s ‘strategic partners.’ Two other candidates said that Russia must be a strategic partner, but not Belarus.
Only Rukh-2 leader Yury Kostenko and Ukrainian Social Democratic party leader Vasyl Onopenko clearly state in their programs that they want to integrate into European structures and NATO.
Kostenko’s program is generally seen as the most Western and reformist of the bunch. He said that he is ready to privatize everything for cash, allow the sale of land and encourage farming. He also stands for reducing taxes and bank lending rates. He said he was ready to grant greater autonomy to the regions, and significantly reduce the state bureaucracy. All of those are prescriptions of the West.
‘I represent a program that has been successfully implemented in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and other ex-Communist countries,’ he said on Oct. 12.
Other candidates – especially the frontrunners – include similar language in their programs without going as far as Kostenko. Kuchma promises ‘protection of private property,’ Moroz says he would ‘support small and medium-sized businesses,’ and Marchuk says he would ‘defend’ the same types of businesses.
Communist Symonenko said he was ready to introduce ‘a socially oriented model of a multi-sector economy,’ with some elements of both state regulation and free market.
Also, Symonenko wants to ‘reduce the number of rate of taxes,’ Kuchma says he will ‘simplify the tax system and reduce taxes,’ Moroz will ‘simplify the tax legislation and ease the tax burden,’ and Vitrenko will ‘simplify the tax system.’
It’s little wonder some voters have trouble discerning the difference between the programs of the various candidates.
