Editor’s note: As part of its Election Watch project, the Kyiv Post publishes stories assessing the state of the presidential race in Ukraine’s regions submitted by local Ukrainian journalists. The project is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. The donor has no influence on the content.
Before 2014, predicting the results of elections in different regions of Ukraine was a relatively simple task. Voters from the western and northern parts of the country were more willing to support the national-democratic forces, while representatives of the south and east were often backing left-wing and pro-Russian politicians.
One region stood out from time to time: Ukraine’s most western region, Zakarpattya Oblast. Being home to 1.26 million people and 3.4 percent of all voters, it often had a distinct difference in political preferences with the rest of the country.
This was evident in the first round of the 2010 presidential election, when pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych won the victory in the region. The situation repeated in 2012. Then the pro-Russian Party of Regions received almost 31 percent of the votes in Zakarpattya Oblast and secured the first place as well as half of the seats from single-mandate constituencies. In the neighboring Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv oblasts, this political force did not pass a five percent threshold.
However, this fact does not indicate a clear pro-Russian leaning of the Zakarpattya Oblast population. Indeed, in other campaigns, including the parliamentary elections in 2007 and 2014, and the presidential elections in 2014, the representatives of the national-democratic parties won in Zakarpattya. This included Viсtor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine (Nasha Ukraina), Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and Petro Poroshenko’s Solidarity Bloc.
The 2019 presidential election in Ukraine is different compared to the previous ones since there are more than two leaders in almost every oblast, and in most of them, it’s impossible to predict the winner. For Zakarpattya, however, such a situation is a norm in every election. Candidates here have to work with a more segmented electorate than in neighboring oblasts of western Ukraine.
Voters’ preferences
The latest election polls that looked specifically at Zakarpattya Oblast were published in December. The voters then did not show unanimity.
According to a study by Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives foundation, Yulia Tymoshenko was leading in Zakarpattya Oblast with 10.2 percent before the start of the election campaign, followed by Petro Poroshenko with 6.2 percent. Anatoliy Grytsenko had 6 percent while Yuriy Boyko could then get 5.4 percent of support. At least 32 percent of the respondents had not yet determined the candidate they want to vote for, and 13.8 percent said they would not take part in the elections.
The Foundation polled some 500 people for their December study with the margin of error being at 5 percent making the difference between the candidates not significant.
A survey of the Sociological Group Rating called “Portraits of the Regions” also took place in December. Some 1,600 participants took part in the poll and the margin of error was 2.4 percent. According to this poll, Tymoshenko was leading with 12.2 percent. Poroshenko landed the second place with 8.7 percent, followed by Boyko with 5.8 percent, Grytsenko with 4.9 percent, and Oleh Lyashko with 4.8 percent. At the same time, 10.3 percent of the respondents hadn’t yet chosen their preferred candidate, while 26.7 percent were not going to vote at all.
Mykhailo Shelemba, a political scientist at Uzhgorod National University, said that a large percentage of people who don’t take part in elections is typical for Zakarpattya Oblast. During the presidential elections in 2014, the turnout was 51 percent, and in the 2014 parliamentary elections, it was 45 percent, while the overall turnout in Ukraine stood close to 60 percent. Zakarpattya demonstrated one of the worst turnovers throughout the country.
Zakarpattya in the past
“The impact of Zakarpattya Oblast on the final result of the election is insignificant,” Shelemba said. “But events here almost always have an impact on the image of candidates and their messages.”
On the eve of the Orange Revolution all the eyes were on the second largest city of Zakarpattya, Mukachevo. The attention of the national media had been on it for almost a year as there was a struggle between representatives of the Our Ukraine party, the future President Viktor Yushchenko and the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine which was led by Viktor Medvedchuk, then-head of the Leonid Kuchma Presidential Administration, and now a political partner of pro-Russian politicians Vadym Rabinovych and Boyko.
In 2002, Viktor Baloga, a representative of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party, won the mayoral election in Mukachevo. At the same time, he was elected a lawmaker of the Verkhovna Rada. Baloga chose parliamentary work and moved to Kyiv. At the new elections in 2003 his party fellow Vasyl Petyovka won.
But his opponent Ernest Nusser, a candidate from the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, appealed Petyovka’s victory in Lviv city court. The court supported Nusser’s claim, yet Petyovka took over the post of mayor anyway. The conflict resolved when then-President Kuchma intervened, instructed the city to consider the Lviv court decision, and appointed Myroslav Opachko from Medvedchuk’s United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine as an acting mayor.
In spring 2004, new elections were held in Mukachevo and Nusser claimed victory. The news was followed by the protests by supporters of Baloga and Petyovka. Viktor Yushchenko, then a presidential candidate, came to the city to support the protesters. In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, the Mukachevo court reinstated Petyovka as mayor.
On the eve of the 2019 presidential campaign, Zakarpattya once again hit the headlines. This time with an international conflict. In fall 2017, the new law on education came in force. The document has changed the format of teaching in schools of national minorities, reducing the number of subjects that could be taught in languages other than Ukrainian.
The new law outraged the Society of Hungarian Culture of Transcarpathia party (KMKSZ), the Democratic Union of Hungarians and the Transcarpathian Hungarian-speaking Pedagogical Society. The Hungarian national minority, in fact, has one representative in parliament – Vasyl Brenzovych (László Brenzovics), a member of the pro-presidential party Petro Poroshenko Bloc. In 2018, he condemned the education bill and called for the European Union to pressure Ukraine to cancel it. At the same time, he thanked the representative of Poroshenko in Zakarpattya, Governor Hennady Moskal for the support of the Hungarian national minority.
The Hungarian government also took part in the conflict with the promises to block Ukraine’s path to the EU and NATO until the law on education was cahnged. Hungarian officials said they were waiting for the 2019 elections and the change of power in Ukraine in order to restart the dialogue with Kyiv.
Zakarpattya after 2014
In 2014, both Poroshenko and his party won Zakarpattya. Opora election watchdog noted that the election campaign for the president and his party in the region was conducted by the team of Baloga and his party United Center.
But Baloga and Poroshenko fell apart during the local elections in 2015 when Baloga refused to support the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. In the oblast council, it was Baloga’s United Center that won the most seats – 30 percent, while president’s party followed with 23 percent, Vidrodzhennya (Revival) party (that formerly partnered with the Party of Regions) won 17 percent of seats, and Hungarian KMKSZ claimed 13 percent. Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party was supported by 11 percent of voters and the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc won 6 percent.
The United Center, KMKSZ and Batkivshchyna were the first ones to form a coalition in the regional council. The Petro Poroshenko Bloc was invited to join but didn’t. Later, Moskal said that after his appointment as the governor of Zakarpattya Oblast on the eve of the 2015 local elections “the oblast was finally led by a legitimate leader.” Prior to this, he said, “the Baloga family had been controlling it.”
At the end of the day, United Center and Batkivshchyna formed not a ruling coalition, but an opposition in the regional council. Shelemba of the Uzhorod National University calls this a result of the influence of Moskal (who also became a lawmaker of the regional council) and the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. The pro-presidential forces managed to secure the support of the Revival Party and KMKSZ and formed a coalition to control the regional council. This, according to Shelemba, means that the Poroshenko Bloc cares about cooperation with the Hungarian minority and its leaders.
Another political feature of Zakarpattya was that it actually blocked the process of decentralization. The decentralization is one of the most successful initiatives of the Volodymyr Groysman government, since it is one of the few which received approval from Western partners. The President often speaks about it as a successful decision of his team.
However, Zakarpattya has not yet approved a development decentralization plan. In 2018, the regional state administration did not support the creation of any united territorial community. Moskal himself calls this process “uniting people in the collective farms.” He argues that future communities would not be able to secure their own development independently. Moscal also fears that local authorities might use the administrative resources to influence oblast without state control.
Fighting for votes in 2019
Zakarpattya entered the Ukrainian electoral discourse last autumn. The Ukrainian media spread information that Baloga will lead the main campaign headquarters of Grytsenko. First, the candidate himself did not refute this information. Instead he said that he had not yet put together a team.
A month later Baloga told Ukrainska Pravda that he will not chair the Civic Position party’s campaign headquarters, but would be “happy if Grysenko, Andriy Sadovyi and Sviatoslav Vakarchuk formed a joint team” for the election.
In summer 2018, Moskal took charge of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc’s office in Zakarpattya Oblast. And in January 2019, he told M-Studio, an Uzhgorod television channel, that he leads the incumbent president’s campaign headquarters in Zakarpattya.
Yaroslav Hulan, the OPORA election watchdog’s civic voting rights ombudsman, told the Kyiv Post that his organization found no instances where Moskal had advocated or used administrative resources in favor of Poroshenko.
Opora also did not find any systematic violations of campaign rules by other political forces. But the NGO did note that “black PR” against candidates Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Grytsenko, and Tymoshenko was published in regional newspapers. The organization also occasionally noticed political ads for Poroshenko, Tymoshenko, and Ruslan Koshulynsky that didn’t identify who ordered them.
Mykhailo Shelemba notes that the 2019 election campaign in Zakarpattya does not differ in terms of message or the forms of agitation from other regions of Ukraine. Hulan echoes his words. According to OPORA, since the start of the campaign, the regional party offices in Zakarpattya have received financing from the political parties’ central headquarters. Thus, the party leadership agrees with any regional actions.
In the course of the campaign, the majority of candidates ignored Zakarpattya Oblast in their speeches and travels. Until March 2019, only Zelenskiy (as part of his tour with Kvartal 95), Sadovyi and Valentyn Nalyvaichenko visited the region. Boyko, Tymoshenko, and Poroshenko only came in that last month of the campaign.
According to Opora, Boyko — who represents the Opposition Platform – For Life party — met with members of the Society for Hungarian Culture of Zakarpattya. And, at the end of the month, Iosyp Borto, deputy chair of the Zakarpattia Oblast Rada, attended a meeting with Tymoshenko. However, he said he attended the event as a representative of the Society for Hungarian Culture and was not supporting the candidate.
Poroshenko visited Zakarpattya as for the Zakarpattya Council of Regional Development. After the president’s visit, Poroshenko’s Facebook page published a video called “Successes of Decentralization in Zakarpattya.”
According to Shelemba, the presidential candidates needed to meet with many different groups in Zakarpattya Oblast in order to achieve a guaranteed advantage in the region. That includes representatives of small towns, which make up most of the region; representatives of various ethnic communities, especially the Hungarian and Romanian minorities; and other local business and political elites.
However, neither party representatives, nor minority organizations, nor Baloga and the United Center team have expressed their support for any of the candidates so far.
Story translated from Ukrainian by Olena Goncharova and Matthew Kupfer.
