Editor’s Note: Election Watch is a regular update on the state of the presidential race in Ukraine. The country will elect its next president on March 31, 2019, with a possible runoff on April 21. The Election Watch project is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. The donor doesn’t influence the content. Go to kyivpost.com for more election coverage.
The post-Christmas lull is officially over: This week, the presidential campaign finally gained some velocity and vigor.
More candidates have registered, but two key people are still playing coy: President Petro Poroshenko, who is expected to announce his bid for re-election next week, and rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, who keeps teasing audiences by not saying whether he will run or not — although the signs point to “not.”
New candidates
The Central Election Commission had registered 13 candidates as of Jan. 24, with five being added in the past week.
The latest additions are:
• Gennadiy Balashov, a businessman running the minor Party 5.10 whose main agenda is a radical simplification of taxes and which won 0.4 percent in the parliamentary election in 2014;
• Olga Bogomolets, a lawmaker and the owner of a private medical clinic, who came eighth in 2014 election with 1.9 percent of the vote;
• Yuriy Boyko, a lawmaker and former energy minister in the government of runaway former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych;
• Roman Nasirov, the former head of the Fiscal Service and currently a defendant in a major corruption case;
• Oleksandr Shevchenko, the director of Bukovel ski resort, representing Ukrop, a party backed by the resort’s owner, oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.
Other candidates have announced or confirmed that they are running, but are yet to officially register with the Central Election Commission.
One of them is Roman Bezsmertniy. A former lawmaker, he has held a number of posts, including that of the head of third Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s election headquarters in the 2004 election, the rigging of which sparked the Orange Revolution. His most recent job was as a peace negotiator for Ukraine in Minsk. He stepped down from that post in 2016.
Bezsmertniy announced not only his bid for the presidency but also the creation of a new party that will participate in the parliamentary election on Oct. 31. The party’s first meeting will take place in Kyiv on Jan. 26, and their agenda has been described as “neo-conservative.”
While hardly a heavyweight politician anymore, Bezsmertniy is still a familiar face to most Ukrainians thanks to his long record and TV presence. In a recent interview with the ZIK TV channel, Bezsmertniy said he was “tired of bringing cartridges to people who can’t shoot.”
The deadline for the registration of candidates is Feb. 3. On Feb. 8, the Central Election Commission has to announce the final list of candidates.
Meanwhile, rock star Vakarchuk at an event in London cryptically said of his expected venture into politics: “I’m in, and soon you’ll know more.” But he followed that by saying he had no interest in power per se and just wanted to bring new people into politics, which could mean he wants to skip the presidential election but participate in the parliamentary election in October.
Parties throw parties
The past week, several parties hosted party congresses to nominate their candidates.
Unlike political conventions in the West, these party congresses are more of a formality. As most of the political parties in Ukraine are united not by ideology, but rather by a central personality, there is no intrigue as to whom each party will nominate.
In this sense, the least intriguing was the biggest event of the week: the party congress of Batkivshchyna, which now has just 20 seats in parliament. It gathered several thousand people on Jan. 22, providing a big stage for its leader Tymoshenko’s official nomination for the presidency.
The event had it all: War veterans, music performances, and a video endorsement from Mikheil Saakashvili, a former president of Georgia and ex-governor of Odesa Oblast, who was deported from Ukraine in early 2018 after he fell out with Poroshenko.
Some of Saakashvili’s supporters were disappointed by his support for Tymoshenko, a notorious representative of the “old school” of the Ukrainian politicians.
Another surprise at the event was a video of a Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, very popular in Ukraine in the 2000s, speaking highly of Tymoshenko. Coelho later tweeted it wasn’t an endorsement.
The Radical Party of Oleg Lyashko also held a party congress on Jan. 21, nominating Lyashko for the presidency. They went as far as inviting Lyashko’s former junior school teacher to speak, and going into some personal details, explaining that Lyashko’s birth had been a medical marvel.
Pro-East candidates
Finally, Opposition Bloc lawmaker Oleksandr Vilkul was nominated for the presidency — but not exactly by his mother party. Although he is an Opposition Bloc candidate, technically Vilkul was nominated by a newly registered party called Opposition Bloc — Party of Peace and Development.
The need to register a new party came after the Opposition Bloc, a party that was launched after the EuroMaidan Revolution by the former members of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, suffered a split in November.
The party had 43 members in parliament, some of whom were backed by the richest oligarch and Party of Regions’ sponsor Rinat Akhmetov, while others were close to exiled oligarch Dmytro Firtash and pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk. These ties were many times reported in Ukrainian media and asserted by observers and insiders, although they were never confirmed by the oligarchs themselves.
This supposed alliance came apart in late 2018, when each of the two groups offered their own candidate for the presidency.
The party frontman Boyko joined Medvedchuk’s separate party Opposition Platform — For Life (Oppozytsiyna Platforma — Za Zhyttya) as their candidate.
Vilkul, formerly a top official in Yanukovych’s government and a top manager of Akhmetov’s mining company, became the candidate for the remaining group and registered a new party with a not-so-new name, Opposition Bloc — Party of Peace and Development.
Boyko polled at 6 percent and Vilkul at 1 percent in a December poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. In the same poll, 23 percent said they don’t know who they would vote for, and 13 percent said they either would ignore the election or spoil their ballots.
Both Vilkul and Boyko have a similar “anti-war” and low-key pro-Russian agenda and appeal mostly to Russian-speaking voters in eastern and central Ukraine, who were the base for the Party of Regions.
Political billboard of Opposition Bloc candidate Oleksandr Vilkul on Jan. 17, 2019, in Zhytomyr. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Zelenskiy’s first scandal
Popular actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has dominated the election news in January after announcing his bid for the presidency, got into his first bit of trouble when journalists discovered he had lied about closing his filmmaking business in Russia.
In an interview in December, Zelenskiy boasted that he shut down his profitable filmmaking business in Russia after it started its war against Ukraine in 2014.
But on Jan. 17, the journalists of Schemes, an investigative unit of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, revealed that Zelenskiy owned through a Cypriot company several active companies in Russia. One of them even recently applied for Russian government funding.
Zelenskiy’s stance on the revelation shifted throughout the week. He first said that the journalists had lied, then apologized and admitted that the companies remain active so he can collect royalties for his past movies.
Finally, on Jan. 23, Zelenskiy waved at his 2.3 million Instagram followers a document that said he had quit the Cypriot company that owns the Russian businesses, leaving it to his partners.
The scandal earned Zelenskiy some major criticism, as well as unflattering comparisons to Poroshenko, whose confectionary factory in Russia was active until 2017.
It also reinforced the biggest criticism of Zelenskiy — that of his association with oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. Both deny there is a political alliance between them, saying they are only business partners through Kolomoisky’s 1+1 TV channel, which airs Zelenskiy’s shows.
However, in line with the oligarchs’ long practice of supporting their friends or attacking enemies through their media, 1+1 news segments defended Zelenskiy against the accusations regarding his Russian business.
