As Ukraine prepares to inaugurate a new president, some lawmakers are looking ahead to parliamentary elections in late October.
On April 23, media outlets shared photos and videos of food packages with pasta, buckwheat, canned meat and fish, condensed milk, sunflower oil and a bottle of red wine, all marked as Easter gifts from Serhiy Pashynsky, a lawmaker from the 80-member People’s Front party.
The parcels were delivered to people older than 65 in Korosten, a city of 65,000 residents just 150 kilometers northwest of Kyiv. On its Facebook page, Pashynskiy’s charity also posted photos of a video projector it gave to a local kindergarten and basketballs presented to a local school this month.
Pashynsky didn’t respond to requests for comment.
People’s Front has witnessed a spectacular fall from grace since it took parliament by storm in 2014. Currently, it has almost no support and has not even been included in recent polls. But Korosten’s single-member district could still give Pashynsky a shot at being reelected.
Under the current law, 225 out of 450 lawmakers are elected from single-member constituencies. The rest of parliament is formed using the closed party list system, under which parties must reveal to voters only the top five names on their lists. This allows them to bring publicly unpopular but rich and powerful party sponsors — hidden below the fifth position — into the Verkhovna Rada.
Ukraine’s richest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, was elected to parliament this way in 2006 and 2007. Both times, he was included in the seventh spot on the lists of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. During his time in parliament, Akhmetov was almost never present in the Rada.
For years, it has been no secret that the electoral system needs urgent reform to prevent these kinds of dishonest actions. Both President Petro Poroshenko and President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy claimed in their campaigns that parliamentary elections should be held under a party system with open lists.
But these changes haven’t yet been adopted by parliament and have nearly no chance of being implemented this year, experts say.
“I see no prospects for it so far,” said Olga Aivazovska, head of the Opora election watchdog.
New electoral code
When Poroshenko campaigned for the presidency in 2014, he promised that the next parliament would be elected using a system of open party lists. That never happened.
Only in November 2017 did parliament pass a new electoral code in its first reading with the minimal required 226 votes. Although the bill was co-sponsored by members of the parliamentary coalition — including Rada speaker Andriy Parubiy — lawmakers have yet to give it (and its roughly 4,000 proposed amendments) a second reading.
“Nobody wants this system,” said Oleksandr Chernenko, a lawmaker from the 135-member Poroshenko Bloc party faction and co-sponsor of the electoral code. “There is no common opinion on it in the factions and the lawmakers elected from single-member constituencies are against it.”
The bill envisages that, during parliamentary elections, the parties will offer their national lists of candidates and also create 27 regional lists, filling them with candidates based on their popularity in certain regions.
Voters then have to vote for one party. But they may also choose one candidate in the party’s regional list. If a candidate receives significant support in a regional list, his name will rise in the national list and he will have a higher chance of becoming a lawmaker.
Campaign for new laws
In February, popular rock singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk made an open address to Poroshenko and lawmakers, urging them to pass the electoral code, which would eliminate the corrupt single-member system and would not allow the lawmakers to defect from their parties.
“And most importantly, this system gives the new kind of politicians the highest chance of getting into parliament,” he said.
Zelenskiy, who campaigned for the presidency as a politician of the new generation, also included the need to hold both the parliamentary and local elections using open lists in his program.
Vadym Halaychuk, chief lawyer to Zelenskiy’s campaign and his representative in the Central Election Commission, told the Kyiv Post that holding elections for the next parliament under the old rules would “hopelessly postpone” the achievement of people power, one of the new president’s stated priorities.
However, he said Zelenskiy’s team cannot say whether they support the new electoral code until they see all the amendments made to the document. “The electoral code received so many changes that it’s now unclear how exactly the (party) lists will be formed,” he said.
Aivazovska said she also hasn’t seen the final text of the electoral code with all the changes made by members of the special parliamentary group after it was passed in its first reading. But, so far, she also sees “no real interest” from Zelenskiy’s team in promoting the new election rules.
Chernenko said that Zelenskiy, who has no representation in parliament, has no means to influence the adoption of electoral reform.
Other election bills
Although photos of Pashynsky’s food packages outraged many Facebook users, the lawmaker may feel safe. Nobody can charge him with vote-buying before the parliamentary campaign starts on July 29.
But even after that, Pashynsky faces little risk for distributing, among other things, buckwheat — a method that has been used so frequently in modern Ukrainian history that it has even become a meme and shorthand for vote-buying.
“Buckwheat is now, in fact, partly legal,” Aivazovska said. It may violate the spirit of the law, but there is no punishment for it.
This problem could have been solved with a bill submitted by the government and aimed at strengthening criminal liability for election fraud. But that draft law hasn’t been passed even in the first reading.
The parliament also has a draft law that could save time for internally displaced people and tens of thousands of other Ukrainians who don’t live at their legal registration address. To vote in the recent presidential election, they had to stand in long lines before both rounds for a one-time change of their voting address.
The bill submitted by a group of lawmakers in March 2017 would allow every voter to change their voting address permanently and vote wherever they want, Aivazovska said.
But with that bill languishing away, she added, voters who don’t live near their registration address cannot vote for single-member districts or in local elections at all.
