Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi recently said he is going to leave the mayor’s office, which he has occupied since 2006, and go a level up in politics.
Sadovyi will lead his party, Samopomich, in the parliamentary election now scheduled for October, and fight for the job of prime minister.
The long-serving mayor of Ukraine’s unofficial western capital, Sadovyi isn’t exactly new to nationwide politics.
Samopomich, the party he founded and leads, holds 26 seats in parliament, and received 11 percent of the vote in the 2014 parliamentary elections. However, today the party is polling below 5 percent, meaning it may not get into parliament at all.
But Sadovyi is far from losing hope. He says his party is ready to run — despite losing some of the support and parting ways with several top-level members. He also cites the unpredictability of Ukraine’s election campaigns as proof everything can change for Samopomich.
“Samopomich will be in the next parliament, because we are needed there,” Sadovyi told the Kyiv Post.
Ratings
“’You don’t have a chance,’ they told us,” Sadovyi says, recalling what people said about Samopomich in 2014. At the time, Samopomich polled below the 5-percent threshold as late as one month before the parliamentary elections.
Sadovyi started Samopomich in 2012, but it grew out of the civic platform of the same name he started in 2004, when he was planning to run for mayor for the first time.
During his time as Lviv mayor, Sadovyi has been popular. His city of 720,000 peole, located 540 kilometers west of Kyiv, is the largest city in western Ukraine and a cultural and tourism center, popular with Ukrainians and foreigners alike. The popularity brought by his mayoral job allowed Sadovyi to create a party that would take the third place in the general vote for parliament in 2014.
But times have changed. As of May, the party has lost much of its electoral support. It is polling at 2 percent, according to the Rating sociological group.
Sadovyi blames this on the Ukrainian political system, where populistic promises are rewarded over accomplishments.
“We are a foreign body in Ukrainian politics. We are a stumbling block for those who are ruling the country at the moment,” he says.
Sadovyi says his party had major accomplishments during its tenure in parliament: a law lowering the Single Social Contribution (SSC) tax paid on salaries from 36 to 22 percent, in 2015, and one allowing self-employed individuals to declare bankruptcy, in October 2018. Samopomich believes that the tax still remains too high.
But, according to Sadovyi, the party’s biggest success was blocking constitutional amendments on decentralization, which promised a special status to the territories in eastern Ukraine currently occupied by Russia, in August 2015.
“If that law would have been adopted, there wouldn’t be a Ukraine today,” Sadovyi told the Kyiv Post.
Back then, the controversial amendment sparked protests in front of the parliament building. During the demonstration on Aug. 31, 2015, someone threw a grenade at law enforcement, killing four members of the National Guard.
The decentralization law also led to a break in the party. Five members of the Samopomich faction in parliament who voted for the amendment were forced out of the party. They included Hanna Hopko, head of the parliamentary committee on foreign relations, and Ostap Yednak, who later joined the low-profile Syla Lyudei party.
However, according to Sadovyi, people don’t care about laws.
“People are tired of surviving, they want a normal life,” he said.
Regardless of Samopomich’s performance in parliament, the party that will go into election will list 70 to 80 percent of new people, according to Sadovyi. He said they will be chosen through an open process.
This is the first time he will be leading his party into election in person. His mayoral term will run out in 2020, but he is willing to quit earlier.
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi dresses a lion sculpture in downtown Lviv in a vyshyvanka, a traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt, to mark the annual Vyshyvanka Day on May 16, 2019. (UNIAN) (source)
Garbage wars
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the Lviv mayor and his party.
In 2016, Sadovyi faced a major crisis that threatened his popularity: a garbage crisis. The issue began after a fire erupted at a landfill that was taking in the city’s waste. Three firefighters were killed. The landfill was then closed, and the city found itself with nowhere to store the 600 tons of waste it produces daily.
The mayor alleges that this was a “special operation” ordered by the Presidential Administration to discredit Sadovyi and Samopomich, which had left the pro-government coalition earlier that year, threatening the coalition’s existence. Government officials strongly denied that allegation during the crisis.
Landfills in other regions refused accepting Lviv’s waste. According to Sadovyi, they were told to do so by the government. This led to garbage piling up on the streets of Lviv. Meanwhile, the main landfill remains closed by a court decision.
“It was arson,” says Sadovyi. “The Security Service, police, prosecutor’s office —everyone was involved. But I don’t think they wanted people to die.”
The waste crisis damaged Sadovyi’s popularity. Eventually, the ban on using other landfills was lifted — Sadovyi says that it happened after members of his party went on a hunger strike in Kyiv, and ambassadors and religious leaders requested that the ban be lifted.
Sadovyi points out that the city is currently spending Hr 1 million ($37,000) to send its trash to other landfills far from the city.
During the latest Samopomich party congress, on May 11, members of the party brought up the waste crisis. They suggested that problems in Lviv have affected the party’s rating.
Elections
On May 16, the parliament set the date for President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s inauguration for May 20. Formally, the president has the right to dissolve the parliament and call for early elections, a possibility which Zelenskiy is not ruling out.
Sadovyi says that Samopomich may support snap elections if the parliament in the nearest future doesn’t pass several key reformist laws.
One of them is a law on electoral reform that was passed in 2017 in the first reading with 226 votes — the minimum needed. It has yet to be brought up for a second hearing.
If approved, the law will introduce a proportional representation electoral system featuring open party lists and will cancel single-member districts that often see vote buying. That would allow voters greater control over who makes it to parliament.
However, according to Sadovyi, it is unlikely that the law will be passed. He says the parliament has no strong coalition united by values, and laws are passed through horse-trading and vote buying.
According to Sadovyi, even if the law won’t be passed, during this election Samopomich will be introducing the coveted open-party list internally: its members will vote to determine their order on the ballot.
Recalling the previous parliamentary elections, Sadovyi says that many people wanted to join Samopomich. Some even tried to buy a spot for as much as a million dollars. Sadovyi said that Samopomich rejected the offer, but those people still managed to enter parliament as members of other political parties, he added. He wouldn’t reveal their names or say which parties accepted them.
Internal struggles
The turmoil isn’t just outside Samopomich. The party also faces struggles in its ranks. Since the start of April, seven members of the parliamentary faction left the party — including Iegor Soboliev, the faction’s deputy head.
Sadovyi says that some of those who left were likely not ready to accept those changes that the party is undergoing: an open party list and an open competition for spots on that list.
However, lawmaker Viktoriya Voytsitska, one of those who left Samopomich, wrote on Facebook that the party didn’t listen to its lawmakers and has lost its identity.
Nonetheless, what remains of the party is ready to go it alone in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Sadovyi certainly does not appear ready to unite with likeminded politicians from other parties. During the first round of the presidential election, Sadovyi pulled out of the race and threw his support behind former Defense Minister Anatoliy Grytsenko during the first round of the vote, which was held on March 31. Grytsenko ultimately came in fifth place, receiving slightly less than 7 percent of the vote.
Sadovyi said that he and Grytsenko have never discussed any potential political projects.
According to Sadovyi, those who advocated for uniting behind a single candidate from the democratic opposition were doing so for their own personal interests.
Zelenskiy, Poroshenko, Vakarchuk
On May 16, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, leader of the popular Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy, announced that he would run for parliament from a newly created party, Holos (“voice” or “the vote” in Ukrainian), that he will lead.
Before the official start of the 2019 presidential campaign, Vakarchuk was viewed as one of the potential candidates. For a time, he ranked higher than Zelenskiy in opinion polls.
The Kyiv Post interviewed Sadovyi before Vakarchuk made his announcement. During that interview, the Lviv mayor said that he would love to see Vakarchuk in the next parliament. Sadovyi said that he and the rock musician talk frequently, but declined to specify whether they ever discussed Vakarchuk’s potential political career.
Over many months before the presidential race, Vakarchuk flirted with the possibility of running, never giving reporters a clear answer on his plans. By the time he announced he would not run for president, many people were tired of his antics.
According to Sadovyi, Vakarchuk lost momentum, while Zelesnkiy understood how to beat incumbent President Petro Poroshenko.
Poroshenko chose an aggressive approach, while Zelenskiy ran his campaign on a message of unity, something that Ukraine desperately needs, Sadovyi said.
“This summer I understood that Zelesnkiy is a serious project,” said Sadovyi.
Poroshenko’s electoral support largely came from western Ukraine, specifically Lviv Oblast. Sadovyi suggested that this was primarily due to Poroshenko’s straightforward support for Ukraine’s European integration and the protection of the Ukrainian language. Unlike the incumbent, Zelenskiy could not convince the West that his proposals are what Ukraine needs.
Sadovyi says that it is too early to judge Zelenskiy.
“We support inaugurating him as soon as possible and moving on,” said Sadovyi. He says it will be easier to understand Zelenskiy after the president-elect will submit his first appointments.
“If they will be worthy people, of course we will support him. If they will be assholes, we will be the ones saying that we can’t do that,” Sadovyi told the Kyiv Post.
According to Sadovyi, the relationship between Zelenskiy and oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, whose 1+1 television channel broadcasts the comedic actor-turned-politician’s shows and lent support to him as a candidate, remains a mystery.
Sadovyi says he has no relationship with Zelenskiy or Kolomoisky. He is waiting to see what concrete actions the new president takes.
Sadovyi does, however, have a long relationship with incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, whom he accuses of being responsible for blocking garbage removal in Lviv.
Despite that, he doesn’t entirely rule out working with the outgoing president, if he changes to better — which, Sadovyi said, would be a miracle.
“We should believe in miracles,” he told the Kyiv Post. “Jesus Christ was resurrected. It’s a miracle.”
