The good news regarding Ukrainian democracy so far in 2010 is that after yet another tightly-contested presidential election and smooth transfer of power, Ukraine has now built an impressive two-decade tradition of free and fair national elections following the Soviet breakup.
The Central Election Commission has received high marks in Western capitals for its professionalism and impartiality, and is arguably today one of the most trusted institutions in Ukrainian public life. To its credit, the CEC has become boring. The rule of law governs the campaigning and vote-counting process with an orderliness that continues to be lacking in many other areas of Ukrainian society. The drama in Ukraine’s national elections is now – as in Western countries – simply about who gets the most votes, rather than in disruptions and technicalities of the election process.
The bad news is that in terms of both local government and the country’s convoluted political party structures, Ukraine is still a mess. Local politicians are not accountable to the voters of the city or town which they purportedly serve, but rather to their national political organizations. Local budget revenues are practically non-existent; ex-presidential candidate and prominent oppositionist Anatoliy Hrytsenko recently estimated that 90 percent of local budget income is dependent on subsidies from the national budget, meaning that bureaucrats in the capital are micro-managing public development projects in every corner of Ukraine.
As if the central bureaucracy in Kyiv were not enough, local governing councils are also constantly in conflict with oblast (provincial) power structures, including un-elected oblast “governors” appointed by presidential decree. The national parties routinely shuffle candidates geographically, meaning that members of local and oblast governing councils are generally not even residents of the localities they are assigned to. According to another opposition leader, Arseniy Yatseniuk, other un-elected officials such as local prosecutors, tax inspection officials, and the police run the show in most communities, wielding far greater powers than elected local government heads.
One of the main reasons for Ukraine’s failure to evolve effective local government is that the country’s political parties continue to lag far behind their counterparts in Western liberal democracies in terms of local structure. All the major Ukrainian parties are still centralized, top-down vehicles that serve the political and financial interests of their own elite, rather than grass-roots based organizations where local rank-and-file party members have a say in choosing who represents them on party tickets.
Case in point: following the recent British parliamentary election, Gordon Brown resigned as leader of the Labor Party immediately when it became clear that he had lost the prime minister’s job. Brown’s party performed poorly, and he had to take personal responsibility for the consequences.
Contrast this with Viktor Yushchenko’s actions after he won just 5.5 percent of the vote in Ukraine’s presidential election. Yushchenko took a party which, as recently as three years ago, was a formidable political force uniting nationally conscious Ukrainians, and ran it straight into the ground. Our Ukraine claimed some 15 percent support in the 2007 parliamentary vote. Polls today put its support at less than two percent.
Yet only a few days after one of the most embarrassing re-election bids of any national leader anywhere, Yushchenko held a press conference to announce that he intends stay active in politics and lead Our Ukraine into the next parliamentary and local elections. There was apparently not even a rustle of debate or discussion inside Our Ukraine about whether, after such a crushing defeat, Yushchenko is the right man to head the movement.
Yulia Tymoshenko’s eponymous bloc BYuT, though it commands a far higher level of support (currently estimated at some 12-15 percent) than Our Ukraine, is no better in terms of top-down structure. In both cases, we are talking about fossilized hierarchies where the party serves the leader, rather than the other way around. Indeed, Tymoshenko’s personal control over BYuT was estimated by most Ukrainian analysts to be even tighter than Viktor Yanukovych’s control over his Regions Party – itself beholden to wealthy business interests and hardly a beacon of grass-roots people power – throughout the presidential campaign.
With at least four other parties now claiming to lead the opposition to Yanukovych’s regime, BYuT is struggling to stay in the game. In order to make her political force more competitive and bring it into line with a European format, Tymoshenko would be wise to democratize BYuT internally, and also to re-name the movement to reflect its center-left, nationally-conscious ideology. Without a major rebranding, the odds of BYuT reclaiming the popularity of its heyday following the Orange Revolution (2005-2007) appear slim to none.
Even the newer and relatively more progressive political forces of Yatseniuk and Sergiy Tigipko – the Front for Change and Strong Ukraine, respectively – are little more than star vehicles for the two young politicians. With the possible exception of the Rukh Party in the 1990s, independent Ukraine has yet to see a political movement with enough ideological traction to transcend its leadership.
All five of the Ukrainian political factions currently in Parliament – Our Ukraine, BYuT, the Party of Regions, the Lytvyn Bloc, and the Communists – operate as secretive clans that lack any type of transparent primaries or caucuses to choose the people who represent their parties in elections. In the absence of such mechanisms, major party players simply impose appointments from the top down.
It has long been assumed, though never proven, that these appointments to the party lists are generally based on cash payments. While reports that would-be MPs pay central party organizations as much as $ 5 million each for seats in parliament may be an exaggeration of Ukrainian political mythology, there is little doubt that seats have been sold for impressive sums.
However, simply changing the electoral system of party lists and straight proportional voting – which is so convenient for selling seats – to a majority system of geographic districts would not necessarily solve the problem. Even in the latter system, absent a network of local primaries/caucuses, the central party leadership would still be able to use its control over the nominating process to hand-pick which candidates are elected.
Lawyer and parliament member Mykola Katerynchuk, a top Tymoshenko ally, noted in a recent television appearance that in a single-mandate election system, intra-party competition for nominations would simply be settled by which candidate offers the party leadership the most money for assignments to favorable geographic districts. This situation would arise because Ukraine’s geographic political polarization would make most single-mandate district contests non-competitive.
In fact, Ukraine employed such a system in the 1990s, when half of parliament (225 deputies) was elected from single-mandate districts. The result was wide-scale geographic reshuffling of candidates by the major parties, and parliament members who ended up representing regions of Ukraine that many of them had never so much as set foot in before the start of the campaign.
The centralization of political parties continues to undermine local self-government in Ukraine. Add this to the fact that many local matters of critical economic importance are decided by un-elected officials who answer to Kyiv rather than to local voters, and you have a system whereby largely impoverished local populations are deprived of any real levers of influence over their governments. Such a system of government can only be described as modern-day feudalism.
Real democracy is about more than just high-profile national elections, however much international acclaim these elections may receive for fairness and transparency. At bottom, democracy is about giving people the right to choose their own representatives and the means to run their own affairs, and in this respect, the Ukrainian political system has a very long way to go.
Will Ritter is a former managing editor of the Kyiv-based IntelNews information agency. He can be reached at [email protected]
