Three women are running for the Ukrainian presidency, the most in any race since independence 18 years ago. But among the ladies, only Yulia Tymoshenko stands a chance of topping the 15 male contenders.
The prime minister’s female opponents in the race are veterans Inna Bohoslovska and Ludmyla Suprun, both sporting stylish Slavic features and lots of hair available for styling and braiding – just like Yulia. And they all can wear a vyshyvanka (traditional Ukrainian embroidered blouse) to show that they are new national leaders. Small wonder that critics say their role is simply to grab votes from the “Orange princess.”
Rather than standing a realistic chance, they will perform a technical spoilers’ role in the elections, chipping away at Tymoshenko’s base of support in round one and instructing followers to back ex-Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych in the second round. After all, the women’s former boss, ex-President Leonid Kuchma, has endorsed Yanukovych. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be Kuchma,” the former president told BBC Radio on Oct. 16, explaining his loyalty to Yanukovych.
Bossy Bohoslovska
It’s impolite to talk about a woman’s age in Ukraine. But Bohoslovska is the same age as Tymoshenko. Any female votes she takes away from Tymoshenko among Ukrainian women will go to Yanukovych, the Regions Party leader, in the second round. Bohoslovska ran on the Regions’ Party ticket in the last Verkhovna Rada race and has been a regular on TV talk shows.
She has in the past been the public face of various political initiatives and pronouncements of Victor Pinchuk, the influential son-in-law to Kuchma. For these elections, the billionaire is rumored to have diversified his interests and backing Arseniy Yatsenyuk as well. He also seems to have made peace with his former bitter enemy Tymoshenko. His last Yalta summit in September featured Tymoshenko prominently, and glimpses of meetings and greetings between Tymoshenko and Pinchuk seem warm and amicable.
Kozachka Suprun
First elected to parliament at 33 in 1998, Ludmyla Suprun is the youngest among the ladies. She’s been at the political game for 11 years already, starting off with the Peoples’ Democratic Party, the Kuchma-era “party of power,” once comprised of professional bureaucrats and nomenklatura loyal to the former president. The party’s previous leader, Valeriy Pustovoitenko, served as Kuchma’s prime minister in the 1990s. The party was a source of “administrative resources” – governmental manipulation of election results in the past, but many technocrats have since fled its ranks. In 2007, the electoral bloc attracted only 81,000 votes.
Before coming to politics, Suprun pursued an academic career, first in an agricultural institute, then a foreign relations department in a state management institute. She moved on to combine the two specialties to become manager of an international agricultural association in 1993.
Tymoshenko’s millions
Among the male candidates, Yanukovych is the one to beat. But Tymoshenko stands the best shot of beating him.
In the last 2007 Rada elections, Tymoshenko’s bloc came within 800,000 or so votes of Yanukovych’s Regions Party. Tymoshenko forces were supported by 7.2 million voters and Yanukovych’s group won 8 million.
Tymoshenko has come far since coming into her own as a political force. In 2002, her eponymous electoral bloc was supported by 1.8 million voters. In 2004, she jumped on the Victor Yushchenko’s bandwagon and contributed millions of supporters during the winning 2004 Orange Revolution.
In 2006, 5.6 million voters chose to support Tymoshenko in a snap parliamentary election. Yanukovych and the Regions were supported by 8 million. Eighteen months later, the Regions failed to gain significant votes while Tymoshenko registered a 1.6 million vote jump in the pre-term election.
November polls showed Yanukovych beating Tymoshenko by at least 10 percent. Both scored below 30 percent., not enough for a first-round victory. November polls also showed 15 to 20 percent of voters were still undecided. That’s up to five million voters – possibly a third of the votes needed to get elected.
If past presidential elections are a guide, one has to garner at least 15 million votes to win. Leonid Kravchuk, the nation’s first president, was supported by 19.6 million in 1991, while Kuchma by 14 and 16 million in 1994 and 1999. Yushchenko needed 15 million to win the rerun of the falsified 2004 vote.
In 2004, Yanukovych and Yushchenko scored 11 million votes each, according to official returns. To reach that plateau both Yanukovych and Tymoshenko have to better their 2007 results by attracting at least 3 million new voters.
Tymoshenko has to do well in the country’s populous eastern and southern regions, where people like to see Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Tymoshenko take potshots at Ukraine’s president during press conferences. She’ll get some votes from western Ukraine for round two.
Vitrenko absent
Absent from this year’s race is the only woman who has dared to run for the presidency in the past: Progressive Socialist Party’s Natalya Vitrenko, known for her aggressive pursuit of the evil capitalist West.
With peak support of more than two million votes in 1999, Vitrenko helped split the left-wing vote against Kuchma. Her party failed to win any seats in parliament in the last election, gaining roughly 300,000 votes only.
But even with the absence of the loud Vitrenko, there are plenty of “babes” in the race in contrast to the dull ties and fat bellies of the more common gender in politics, even if two of the female candidacies exist to only get the male front-runner, Yanukovych elected in place Tymoshenko, the leading woman in the race.
Stephen Bandera is a former Kyiv Post editor.
