In polls since late 2008, Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko’s popularity keeps sinking to new lows. With less than 3 percent of respondents saying they would vote for him in another election, Yushchenko trails far behind rivals Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister, and Victor Yanukovych, the leader of the Regions Party, which has the largest faction in parliament.
Yushchenko also ranks below lesser politicians such as Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Petro Symonenko and Volodymyr Lytvyn. All of these findings have made it clear that Yushchenko’s chances for a second term are, at best, dim.
One hopes that even the detached President and his myopic aides will acknowledge that re-election is beyond reach. As bitter as this might be for the hero of the Orange Revolution, this circumstance also provides the Orange camp with a window of opportunity to complete the push for democratization started four years ago. To put it bluntly, Ukraine should get rid of its ill-construed semi-presidential system.
After the fall of the U.S.S.R., most ex-republics adopted an executive structure in which the top party secretary became the president. Provided by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, this transmutation was later rationalized as an adoption of the French model of government.
In reality, the division of executive power between the president and prime minister in much of the post-Soviet world had little to do with learning from France’s experience. It was, instead, the result of idiosyncratic power-struggles in the former Soviet republics. The seemingly novel configurations of institutions in the central apparatuses of the Newly Independent States were christened “parliamentary-presidential” or “presidential-parliamentary” though, in most cases, these political systems were or, still are, neither.
Rather, they constitute – or constituted – autocracies or oligarchies with a rubber-stamp and/or toothless parliament, and with a head of government who is no head and does not govern, but is merely the country’s highest ranking bureaucrat, often playing the role of a scapegoat in case things go wrong.
In Ukraine, this started to change in late 2004 when, oddly, the opponents of the Orange Revolution initiated a partial shift of prerogatives from the president to the prime minister as well as to the Rada, thus creating something close to real semi-presidentialism.
As important as this transfer of power was for the re-democratization of Ukraine, it merely transformed the problem. It did not solve the problem. Since then, Ukraine has a divided government with a duumvirate at its top.
Ukrainians don’t need political scientists to explain how unsatisfactory this arrangement is. Since 2005, the country has experienced agonizing conflicts between the president, on the one side, and its two “cohabitating” prime ministers (Tymoshenko, Yanukovych), on the other.
What (not necessarily foreign) political scientists should be telling Ukrainians is that this problem is, contrary to what many believe, not something unique to Ukraine.
One often hears from both younger and older citizens of Ukraine that democracy does not properly work there because of the low political culture, moral inadequateness or similar deficiencies of Kyiv’s political elite. But these shortcomings are not the only and, probably, not even the main reason for last year’s destructive confrontations between power holders.
International experience shows that these clashes – president vs. parliament, head of state vs. head of government, are inherent to duumvirates, and typical for semi-presidential regimes in emerging democracies, in particular.
Contrary to commonly held opinion, Ukraine’s chaotic politics of the last years has less to do with the culture of its nation than with the structure of its state. The problem with semi-presidentialism – is that it elevates conflicts between political parties or camps into confrontations between the branches of power or constitutional organs.
An old democracy like France is able to deal with these tensions and euphemistically calls the conflict emerging from different parties occupying the country’s highest posts “cohabitation.”
In young democracies and especially in post-colonial ones like Ukraine, the stakes of the decisions to be taken by the top officials are much higher.
Here, minor inconsistencies in the voting behavior of the electorate or in the coalition-building of the parties or factions may transform into major political standoffs that, in the worst case, come close to civil war (like in Russia in September-October 1993).
Contrary to what many in the post-Soviet world believe, the prime minister of Britain or chancellor of Germany have more power, in their national contexts, than the president of the United States – at least in those situations in which the president’s party does not have a majority in Congress.
It should be noted that not only Moscow’s political technologists, but also a number of serious international political scientists, advocate presidentialism and see this form of democracy as superior to parliamentary systems. The world’s oldest democracy, the United States, is the obvious example.
However, concerning the specific challenges young democracies are facing, studies have shown that the stronger a republic’s parliament is, the better are the chances that genuine political pluralism will survive. And the novel government system will consolidate.
Notably, these findings are not outcomes of theoretical considerations by experts who may prefer a particular from of government. Instead, the inference that parliamentarianism is better for an emerging democracy than a presidential or semi-presidential system is based on more or less wide-ranging, cross-national investigations.
The conclusion for a country like Ukraine is that, in order to become a more stable and effective democracy, it should transform sooner rather than later into a parliamentary republic.
Ferocious political conflicts will continue in such a system, but they will happen within the parliament, not between parliament and president. Coalition building will become the major feature of the political process, and replace such strategies as brinkmanship, intimidation and bluffing prominent during intra-executive confrontations in semi-presidential systems.
Parliamentarians able to build bridges between political opponents – as opposed to ideologues whipping up their political camps – will take center stage. Apart from that, for Ukraine, simply having only one national poll every four years will help to save much money and energy that is dearly needed to further reform and stabilize this young nation-state.
Andreas Umland is general editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.hmtl) and co-editor of the journal “Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte.” He administers the website “Russian Nationalism” (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism) which provides extensive up-to-date information on recent trends in Russian right-wing thought and politics.
