ZHASHKIV, Ukraine — Zhashkiv is just 150 kilometers south of Kyiv. But culturally, the city of 14,000 people feels quite distant.
Its center is a handful of crumbling Soviet buildings. Chickens often wander the yards of private houses where the majority of its 14,000 people live. On the outskirts, cows graze in the grass amid fields of sunflowers swaying in the breeze.
It is here that 36-year-old lawmaker Svitlana Zalishchuk is running an improbable campaign for a second five-year term in parliament.
Zalishchuk grew up in Zhashkiv. But today she hardly fits in with the city’s mostly impoverished and often elderly voters. She has spent the last 20 years in Kyiv, where she advocates for pro-Western reforms that the locals often struggle to understand. She admits her campaign in Zhashkiv is an uphill battle.
“I’m not their representative,” she says.
Meanwhile, in Kyiv, her colleague campaigns in a different scene. Sergii Leshchenko — a hip lawmaker who detests corruption and loves electronic music — is seeking reelection in the district where he grew up. Here, the voters at least know him.
Both candidates are facing a challenge that is new for them: for the first time, they are campaigning door-to-door and urging people to support them as individuals.
Like two dozen other young reformers who swept into parliament on party lists in the 2014 elections, Zalishchuk and Leshchenko now find themselves without a political home. If they want to keep their seats, they need to win them on their own.
In the Verkhovna Rada, these young lawmakers united into a pro-Western alliance known as the Euro-Optimists. Many expected them to start their own political party. They never did.
Conflicts with their individual parties and failure to unite has left many Euro-Optimists with a difficult choice: run for re-election in a single-member district or leave politics entirely.
Rise and fall
Zalishchuk and Leshchenko — along with journalist Mustafa Nayyem — all entered parliament on the ticket of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. At the time, the party benefitted from the newly elected president’s immense popularity and the faction won 135 seats, more than any other in the 422-seat parliament.
Like many other parties elected in 2014, the Poroshenko bloc added well-known young activists to its party list to demonstrate its ties to the EuroMaidan Revolution, which had ousted corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych from power earlier that year. Students and forward-looking young people were the vanguards of that pro-Western uprising.
The Samopomich party, which currently has 25 members in the parliament, gave seats to young activist Hanna Hopko, lawyer Olena Sotnyk and Western-educated banker Victoria Voytsitska.
Similarly, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party — currently with 21 members — brought EuroMaidan activists Alex Ryabchyn and Alyona Shkrum into the legislature.
The pro-government People’s Front party, with 81 seats in parliament, added Western-educated young economist Nataliya Katser-Buchkovska to its list.
But influencing Ukrainian politics from the inside turned out to be harder than many of them anticipated. The Euro-Optimists quickly found themselves in conflict with their own parties and the old political elites who ran them.
In 2015, Hopko was among five lawmakers ejected from Samopomich for supporting a law on decentralization. And despite being members of Poroshenko’s party, Leshchenko, Zalishchuk and Nayyem quickly became some of the most vociferous critics of the president. They officially left the party in March 2019.
While many had expected the Euro-Optimists to form a new political force, the group’s differences and infighting crashed these plans.
“Creating a party was never an option, you can’t simply create a party,” Leshchenko says.
They knew they were temporary allies bound to eventually go their separate ways, he adds.
Now the Euro-Optimists are reaping the fruits of their discord. Unable to show instant results, the group has fallen short of expectations. Moreover, after five years in parliament, this “new generation” of politicians has lost its youthful allure.
Iryna Bekeshkina, a sociologist and head of Democratic Initiatives Fund, a Kyiv think tank, says Euro-Optimists had some success in parliament, drawing attention to issues that would otherwise be silenced.
“They were an alien body in Ukraine’s parliament,” she says.
They raised awareness of issues many lawmakers would prefer to silence, says Bekeshkina, resulting in their split with established political parties. But to newly-formed parties, they were a part of the old system.
Tough decisions
Left without support from political parties, many must fight individual battles in single-member districts.
Some have chosen to stick with their parties. Shkrum and Ryabchyn remained with Batkivshchyna, but were pushed down the list. It is unclear whether the party will receive enough votes for the two young politicians to make it to parliament again.
In contrast, Sotnyk and Katser-Buchkovska have chosen to run at the top of the ticket in parties that may not receive the minimum 5 percent of the votes required to enter parliament.
Hopko and Nayyem have decided not to run for parliament.
“Uniting with those with whom I would like to work did not happen and running in a single-member district and once again being in parliament without a team is wrong,” Nayyem wrote on Facebook.
Leshchenko and Zalishchuk are the only Euro-Optimist lawmakers now fighting to enter parliament without party support.
In Ukraine’s mixed electoral system, half of the now 424-member parliament (minus districts in Russian-occupied Donbas and Crimea) are elected through party lists. The other half is elected in single-member constituencies. These single-member districts potentially allow independent candidates to make it into parliament, although it also helps corrupt candidates to buy votes.
Not wanted
Initially, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party and the Golos (Voice) party led by rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk both looked like potential platforms for the Euro-Optimists to return to parliament.
But both parties appear to have given into a wave of anti-establishment sentiment. With few exceptions, they have decided not to accept former lawmakers.
In one clear exception, Golos has officially endorsed Voytsitska’s campaign in Rivne Oblast.
Many Euro-Optimists had their hopes set on these two parties to give them a second chance. But the parties themselves preferred to clear parliament of former elites.
Left to their own devices, the Euro-Optimists still have hope.
“I will join the Servant of the People faction if I’m elected to parliament,” Leshchenko says, not discouraged by the fact that his main competitor in his Kyiv district is a representative of the Servant of the People party.
Zalishchuk says she will join the faction of Vakarchuk’s party Golos (Voice).
“Their ideas are close to mine,” she says.
Even though Golos didn’t endorse her in the race, it didn’t put out a competitor in her district. Zalishchuk says Vakarchuk told her Golos would accept her if she wins.
Meeting reality
On July 5, Zalishchuk and her team made a stop in Buky, a town of 2,000 residents.
The stop is at the town’s medical clinic, which she already visited two weeks earlier. The clinic is the pain point for locals. The authorities have fired half of the clinic’s personnel, leaving only eight employees, and the people worry they won’t get medical help when needed.
The change is part of the ongoing healthcare reform, which Zalishchuk supported in parliament.
The idea seemed fine: cut on the medical personnel in small towns and send their citizens to nearby cities.
The reality proved different. It turned out, there are no paved roads between Buky and the nearest cities with their hospitals.
“Some laws that work in Kyiv, don’t work here,” says Zalishchuk.
It endangers her chances at being elected. Her work in Kyiv contradicts the desires of most of her potential constituents.
While she has focused primarily on foreign affairs, she also supported medical reform and decentralization. She also believes that the longstanding moratorium on farmland sales must be lifted.
Many voters in her rural district reject these ideas.
Svitlana Sinelnyk, a local paramedic, isn’t a fan of the healthcare reform. She says her salary was cut and she is now required to work only half a day. She is the only medical worker for the people of Rusalivka, a village of 600 residents located 30 kilometers from Zhashkiv — and no decent road connects the two places.
“I work till 3 p. m., but if a person who needs help comes at 4 p. m., how can I refuse them?” she asks.
Sinelnyk receives “help” from the village: the local authorities pay her a bonus from the village coffers.
The deputy head of Rusalivka’s village council, Ruslan Hrabovy, asks Zalishchuk what she thinks of decentralization, a process largely supported in Kyiv that requires small villages to unite into aggregated communities.
Zalishchuk supports it. Hrabovy doesn’t.
“We are the only village in the region that makes a profit. Why should we unite with other villages that are making losses?” he asks. “Why don’t we have a choice?”
Zalishchuk agrees that both problems are foreign to lawmakers in Kyiv, who focus on efficiency rather than on people’s needs.
Facing competitors
Trying to overcome her differences with the voters, Zalishchuk reminds them she is a native of Zhashkiv. She proudly tells them that as a kid, she helped her family harvest and sell potatoes at a local market.
“I’m not a rich brat from Kyiv,” she tells people at one of the villages on her campaign trail.
The local appeal means a lot here. In the last two elections, voters in this district voted for a local businessman to represent them in parliament.
Now Valentyn Nychyporenko, a lawmaker and Zhashkiv native, is running for his third term in parliament.
He was first elected in 2012 and joined the faction of the Party of Regions, a pro-Russian party led by President Viktor Yanukovych. When the EuroMaidan Revolution ousted Yanukovych in 2014, Nychyporenko got re-elected as an independent lawmaker.
Nychyporenko is popular in the area due to his “door-to-door help,” according to paramedic Sinelnyk. His method of campaigning is typical for Ukrainian single-member districts.
Several locals who spoke to the Kyiv Post said Nychyporenko helped them out in one way or another, buying plates for the local kindergarten or distributing food and medications to elderly people.
During the campaign, Nychyporenko published a newspaper listing every “gift” he gave to the local people, such as helping organize a local fair and paying to paint a villager’s house.
By contrast, Zalishchuk lacks the financial capacity to offer results right away — something many people squeezed by low pensions and living with poor roads and a lack of drinking water desperately need from a powerful visitor from Kyiv.
Change the system
Ironically, the former Euro-Optimists run in an electoral system they’ve been trying to kill.
The elections in single-member districts have been notorious for vote buying, giving the people with money an easy way into parliament.
That is why Leshchenko, Zalishchuk, and Voytsitska were among the lawmakers who advocated for a new electoral law, finally passed on July 11, under which all lawmakers are to be elected through a proportional representation system with open party lists. That means the people — and not the party — would choose who ends up in parliament from the party list. And the single-member races won’t exist.
The law will come in force only in 2023.
Now that the Euro-Optimists are themselves competing for seats in single-member districts, they haven’t changed their minds: the single-member races must go.
Some voters disagree.
Zalishchuk’s potential voters say the districts are their only chance to meet lawmakers and tell them about their problems.
“Without the single-member races, who will even come to us?” asks Sinelnyk, a village paramedic.
Good exercise
In several weeks of her campaign, Zalishchuk has been to some 60 villages in her district.
Everywhere she went, villagers would eventually wish her luck and say they support her cause — not because of her views, but because she is young and different from the established, rural politicians they are used to seeing.
Despite that, she admits that her chances to win are slim.
“Even if I don’t win, it’s the most important experience of my life,” says Zalishchuk.
It’s also the toughest challenge she has ever faced, she adds.
“I will never regret it. It’s the real thing.”
For his part, Leshchenko says people should not view the Euro-Optimists and their cause as a failure — even if they don’t succeed at the polls.
“People expected too much from us, something that was impossible from the start,” he says.
Sociologist Bekeshkina thinks that the former Euro-Optimists won’t get elected because, to voters, they share responsibility for the parliament’s failures. Still, they played an important role.
“They were civil society’s assault force,” she says. “However, assault forces don’t win wars, an army must follow.”
