Editor’s Note: Election Watch is a regular update on the state of the 2019 races for the presidency and parliament. The country elected the new president on April 21 and will vote for the new parliament on July 21. The Election Watch project is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. The donor doesn’t influence the content.
As soon as he came to power, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy fulfilled his threat to dissolve the parliament and send it into a snap election.
Instead of the regularly scheduled election on Oct. 27, Ukrainians will elect the new parliament on July 21.
“The main argument for dissolving this parliament is the very low level of trust that people have in it,” Zelenskiy said at a meeting with the leadership of the parliament’s factions on May 21, according to his press service.
The presidential decree was met with criticism, but almost all the parties represented in the parliament said they would accept it and participate in the snap election.
Why dissolve it
The constitution allows the president to dissolve parliament for three possible reasons: if no coalition is formed in 30 days, if no government is formed in 60 days, or if the parliament can’t start its session in 30 days.
Zelenskiy dissolved parliament under the first condition, claiming there has not been a coalition since March 2016.
Since the break-up of a broader coalition that year, the parliament has been led by a two-party coalition of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and People’s Front. However, there have been doubts about this coalition’s legal existence. Despite many requests from the media, the parliament has never published the coalition agreement or a list of the coalition’s members, leading to speculation that it didn’t have the necessary 226 lawmakers.
Most parties criticized the dissolution, but accepted it. Some of them expect to benefit from an earlier election — such as the ex-president’s Petro Poroshenko Bloc, which counts on the votes of the 24 percent of Ukrainians who supported Poroshenko against Zelenskiy in the April 21 presidential runoff election.
But not everyone is willing to obey the president.
The 80-member People’s Front — the second-largest parliamentary faction closely associated with ex-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and long-standing and influential Interior Minister Arsen Avakov — condemned the move to dissolve parliament as illegal.
While People’s Front won the party list vote in the 2014 parliamentary election, it has since seen its approval ratings sink. Today, it is the party least prepared for the election: it is expected to re-brand or split into different parties.
But in order to do that, they need more time than two months. So People’s Front is challenging Zelenskiy’s decree to set a snap election in the Constitutional Court, hoping to push the date back and win more time.
No election reform
Despite many hopes to the contrary, the snap election will take place within the existing and widely criticized electoral system, which allows rich people with negative (or absent) political records to buy their way into parliament.
In the existing system, half of the parliament’s 450 lawmakers are elected by closed party lists and another half are chosen through single-member districts. In practice, this means that corrupt candidates can get a place on the party ballot in exchange for a generous unofficial donation. In the single-member districts, they can buy votes or rig the election in other ways.
The democratic opposition and civil society have long been calling to change the system, cancel the single-member districts and introduce the open party lists — a system where voters would have control over exactly whom they are voting for on the party ballot.
Before ordering the snap election, Zelenskiy wanted the parliament to pass changes to the electoral law. That didn’t go well.
Zelenskiy met with parliament’s leadership on May 21, a day after his inauguration, to discuss the snap election and agree on changes to the electoral law. They settled on a compromise: drop the single-member districts and lower the threshold for parties to get into parliament from 5 percent to 3 percent of the vote. The next day, on May 22, Zelenskiy submitted a bill with these changes to the parliament.
That’s when everything went awry for the president.
The factions didn’t support the changes they had negotiated a day before, saying they won’t support a bill that didn’t include open party lists.
The president’s side accused parliament of violating the agreement. According to Ruslan Stefanchuk, the president’s representative in parliament, the open party lists were dropped because the parliament’s leadership said during negotiations with Zelenskiy that this system was too complicated to introduce in two months’ time. In other words, according to Stefanchuk, they were fine with dropping it, but changed their stance to sabotage the president’s bill.
Zelenskiy didn’t try again: he ordered the snap election that will now take place within the old system.
“The old politicians chose the old system because only it can prolong their political life,” Zelenskiy said. “They are counting on squeezing into parliament again on bribes. I’m sure they are wrong. And even in the single-member districts you (the people) will choose new politicians who can change the country for real.”
Parties’ rating
If the election takes place soon, Zelenskiy’s party, Servant of the People, is set to repeat its leader’s election success.
According to the latest ranking of political parties, published on May 22 by the Rating Group, a Kyiv-based polling agency, Servant of the People has by far the largest support.
Among respondents who plan to vote in the election and have decided on their choice, an overwhelming 48 percent want to back Servant of the People.
The party was registered in 2018 and has done nothing so far, revealing no members or party lists.
Before the presidential election, the Kyiv Post asked Zelenskiy how he was planning to find the people to fill the party ballot so fast. The future president said he would be looking for “new, young people,” preferably with legal background.
The runner-up of the party ranking is Opposition Platform — For Life, a pro-Russian party led by the trio of Viktor Medvedchuk, Yuriy Boyko and Vadym Rabinovich, that received 10.5-percent support.
The Petro Poroshenko Bloc, also known as Solidarnist, polled at 8.8 percent. The party is now far from its standing in 2014, when it won the parliamentary election, coming second in the party list vote but first in the single-member districts. It ended up with 135 seats in parliament.
Poroshenko, who is recovering from his election loss to Zelenskiy, said he would rebrand his party before the parliamentary vote.
Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party polled at 7.3 percent, slightly below Poroshenko’s.
Ihor Smeshko, an ex-Security Service chief who made a surprise comeback to politics in the presidential election and took 5 percent of the vote in the first round, can capitalize on his sudden success in the parliamentary election. A minor party he leads, Strength and Honor, polls at 6 percent — just high enough to make it into parliament.
Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, a popular rock singer who announced the launch of his party, Holos (“Voice”), on May 16, polls at just 4.6 percent now. The singer said he would accept no current lawmakers or officials to his party, trying to make it a completely new group.
