Since the 2013-14 EuroMaidan Revolution that forced President Viktor Yanukoych from power,regional elections have not been held. In 2014, voters elected Petro Poroshenko as president in May and a new parliament in October. However, regional and local councils kept working as usual.
The only exception was Kyiv. In 2014, the early local elections there held there simultaneously with the early presidential elections. Some expect the elections to finalize the shift of power after the revolution to mirror “the political architecture” of the national parliament.
However,voting is likely to differ. The front-runner of the 2014 parliamentary campaign, thePeople’sFront led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, now has about 1 percent support,prompting the party to pull out of the location elections.
The new electoral law, however, makes it difficult to characterize the scope of electoral volatility.
According to the law, voters will simultaneously cast their ballot for a party and a party candidate. So far we do not know what will affect voters’ behavior: either attitude towards a party, or towards a candidate.
If a party passes the electoral threshold of 5 percent, its candidates are ranked according to the percentage of vote they received in their constituencies. Thus, nuanced calculations are necessary for transforming data from public polls into the expected electoral outcomes.
Another obstacle for repeating last year’s electoral results is the logic of party competition.
Party politics has changed since last year.
In 2015, relatively well-institutionalized statewide parties with parliamentary factions are competing with new parties, like the Power of People, and parties that are supported in particular regions, like Our Land.
These new political forces are often not independent and cooperate with strong statewide parties. But after the election the regional parties,which have no representation in the national parliament, may populate many regional and local councils.
So it is likely that after the 2015 regional elections, the party competition in the regions won’t necessarily reflect party competition in the national parliament. The political regionalization is a likely outcome of these elections.
Finally, there is one more issue – an issue of political competition “beyond parties.” The new electoral law allows investigating party lists.
This was hardly possible before: party lists used to be closed at parliamentary and regional elections in Ukraine. A brief look at the party lists tells us that, apart from actual party members, there are a lot of non-party members and those candidates who used to represent other political parties before.
Moreover, individual politicians can easily shift their party affiliation. For instance, the political party Our Land brings together lots of city mayors who used to support various “parties of power” in the past.
One more example is Kharkiv Oblast. In 2014 it was a stronghold of the Opposition Bloc; however, this is no longer the case in 2015. Non-stop issues with its registration by the local election commission undermine the party’s chances to gain seats in regional and local councils there.
However,the decision of the highly popular Kharkiv Mayor Hennady Kernes to leave the Opposition Bloc and, instead, lead the Revival Party was the second major reason. By the way, Kernes remains a non-partisan policymaker.
There is little hope for power change. The same policymakers might stay in power, despite shifts in party affiliation.
Thus,voters on Oct. 25 wil lcast their ballots and shift power in regional and local elections all over Ukraine. However, the newly elected regional and local councils won’t necessarily follow the lines of party competition in the current national parliament.
Valentyna Romanova is a local and regional policy expert with the Institute for Strategic Studies “New Ukraine” think tank.
