A total of 24 candidates (out of 46 who attempted
to stand) have been registered, which is more than in 2010 (18) and similar to
the number in 2004 (26). As in every Ukrainian presidential election, there are
two front-runners, which this time round are Petro Poroshenko and Yulia
Tymoshenko, both of whom are not new faces.
The 24 candidates
in next month’s election should be divided into three groups: (1) independents
and narcissists; (2) ancien regime; and (3) former opposition. Among my two
favourites in the first group is Oleh Lyashko, a clown from the virtual Radical
Party, and a consultant to the chairman of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence
Service.
Of the 10 candidates from the former ancien regime, seven are from or linked to the Party
of Regions reflecting internal divisions following the fleeing of President
Viktor Yanukovych from Ukraine. The other three include the Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko who has found the huge deposit to enable him to stand in each election, a
former disgraced Socialist Party leader and Jewish-Ukrainian oligarch.
The former
opposition has ignored numerous calls over the years for unity and put forward
eight candidates. These include three from marginal nationalist parties,
Svoboda (Freedom) party leader Oleh Tyahnybok, former Defence Minister Anatoliy
Grytensko and the two leading candidate Poroshenko and Tymoshenko. One wonders
where many of these marginal political leaders found 2.5 million hryvnya
($200,000) as the deposit they will lose when they do not enter the second
round.
Where for example
did Dmytro Yarosh suspiciously find the $2oo,ooo deposit when Right Sector
emerged from nowhere in the Euromaidan? Indeed, would it not have been more
patriotic for Grytsenko and four nationalist leaders from Rukh, Svoboda, Right
Sector and the People’s Party (UNP) to donate their combined one million dollar
deposits at a time of government cutbacks and financial crisis to Ukraine’s
newly formed National Guard?
Poroshenko
increasingly resembles Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock who held a hubristic victory rally in
Sheffield a week before the April 1992 British elections. Arrogant and smug
Poroshenko, with surprisingly high ratings, already believes he has won the May
elections but, just to make sure, his campaign team called last week upon
Tymoshenko to withdraw her candidacy, which she refused. Kinnock never called
upon Conservative party leader John Major to withdraw but nevertheless was defeated.
What awaits Poroshenko is unclear at this stage but the undemocratic call on
Tymoshenko to step down will inevitably come back to haunt him.
Unpleasantly,
Ukraine’s 2014 election campaign takes us back in time to the early orange
years when Poroshenko was secretary of the National Security & Defense
Council (RNBO) and Tymoshenko was prime minister.
President Viktor Yushchenko
had installed Poroshenko in the RNBO as an alternative government and their
spats led to a political crisis in September 2005 when the government was
dismissed. As on other occasions, orange divisions opened up the path for
defeated candidate Yanukovych and the Party of Regions he led to return to
power.
Poroshenko’s high
levels of support do not fit well with a country that has gone through a
revolution where over 100 protesters were murdered by security forces. After
having gone through an anti-oligarch revolution do Ukrainians really wish to
elect an oligarch who was a founding leader of the Party of Regions and ally of
President Leonid Kuchma? Do Ukrainians wish to replace violent kleptocrat
Yanukovych with Yanukovych-Lite? As a master of Byzantine politics, Poroshenko
has increased his wealth under every Ukrainian President and Prime Minister.
There have been three
constants in Poroshenko’s career. Firstly, he is the epitome of Ukraine’s flip
flopping political and business elite. Secondly, he has always been a supporter
of grand coalitions between Our Ukraine-Party of Regions and arch enemy of
Tymoshenko. Thirdly, he has created three virtual parties with Solidarity in
the title, two of which were merged into the Party of Regions (2000) and
People’s Union-Our Ukraine (2005) and a third he has aligned with Vitaliy
Klitschko’s equally virtual UDAR (Ukrainian Alliance for Democratic Reforms).
Indeed, it is not
surprising therefore three political forces are backing Poroshenko. These
include UDAR, the successor to the pragmatic, anti-Tymoshenko wing of Our
Ukraine, former Kyiv Mayor Leonid (“Cosmo”) Chernovetsky who is another
founding member of the Party of Regions, and the gas lobby who have
successfully worked with every Ukrainian president and prime minister except
Tymoshenko.
Poroshenko was
first elected into parliament in 1998 within the SDPUo (Social Democratic Party
of Ukraine united) headed by the odious Viktor Medvedchuk (1998), donated one
of five parties that merged into the Party of Regions (2000), moved to
Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine (2002), backed Arseniy Yatseniuk’s Front for Change (2008)
and his 2010 election campaign, and joined Mykola Azarov’s government (2012). Poroshenko
continues to profusely deny he is to be found on the tapes made in Kuchma’s office by security guard Mykola Melnychenko, which is a patent falsity,
where he asks for money to bribe parliamentary deputies to defect to the
Solidarity faction and swears his undying allegiance to Kuchma.
In contrast,
Tymoshenko has a less flip-flopping past and her only odious past was when she
was elected to parliament within Pavlo Lazarenko’s Hromada (Community) party in
1998. Tymoshenko political position has remained unchanged since she joined
opposition politics in 2000. Tymoshenko is not on the Melnychenko tapes.
The most bizarre
aspect of the 2014 Ukrainian elections is therefore Poroshenko’s high level of
support and Tymoshenko’s high negative ratings. Neither are angels or new
faces; nevertheless, excuses for Poroshenko’s flip-flopping past and ties to
the notorious corrupt gas lobby are as equally strange as the venom against and
lack of sympathy for Tymoshenko who spent over two years in jail on trumped-up
charges.
Poroshenko is not
the European politician some Ukrainian voters mistakenly believe, not only
because he has called upon Tymoshenko to withdraw her candidacy but also
because he is not a fan of transparency in his personal life and politics and
business.
Transparency about his past flip-flopping is viewed by him and his
election team as “black PR.” Meanwhile, his ties to the odious Dmytro Firtash
and the gas lobby, who pressured Klitschko to withdraw from the election, are a
signal that he is disinterested in fighting corruption and changing the
Byzantine nature of Ukraine’s energy sector. Indeed, how more bizarre can it be
that Poroshenko believed it to be a sound strategic election policy to fly to
Vienna to receive Firtash’s endorsement during the same week the US Department
of Justice outlined criminal charges against him and other co-conspirators. The
charges could land Firtash, who is out on bail in Vienna, decades in US prison.
In mid-June
Ukrainian voters will have elected either Poroshenko or Tymoshenko as president
in a campaign that has not produced the new faces the Euromaidan sought. Both
candidates should agree before the election is over to work together to jointly
deal with Ukraine’s myriad crises. New faces may yet enter Ukrainian politics
but only in the Kyiv city and pre-term parliamentary elections.
Taras Kuzio is a research associate at the Centre for Political and Regional Studies, Canadian
Institute for Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta and Non-Resident Fellow,
Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Relations,
Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC.
