During its last week of work, the Ukrainian parliament has passed a long-anticipated package of election laws, changing the way the legislature is elected.
The law abolishes elections in single-member districts, where half of the parliament is now elected. Instead, all lawmakers will be elected on open party lists, giving voters more control over who gets into parliament than they have now.
The law will come into force on December 1, 2023, meaning that Ukrainians will see its benefits no sooner than in five years. It will have no effect on the snap parliamentary election that will take place on July 21.
The decision is a step toward more transparency and less corruption in Ukraine’s electoral system. Currently, 225 out of 424 seats in the national legislature are elected on political party tickets. Since people usually vote for the name of the party or its top candidates, parties place the most recognizable faces on top of the list. Meanwhile, the single-member districts allow many candidates to simply bribe voters, handing out gifts or donating money in return for votes.
The new rules allow voters to cast their ballots for specific people on the lists. Candidates who receive more votes will stand higher on the list. The five-percent threshold for parties to enter parliament will remain unchanged.
In addition, the election new code obliges political parties to have at least two women among every five candidates on the list. Women only make up 11 percent of the current parliament.
It took lawmakers 17 attempts to get the 230 votes for the bill — four more than the required minimum for it to pass.
Speaker Andriy Parubiy, one of the authors of the new election code, demonstrated persistence rare for Ukrainian lawmakers. He kept urging his colleagues to vote and put the draft law up for a vote again and again, for 17 times.
“Serhiy! Pashinsky! Vote!” he would shout. “Melnychuk, come back!”
“Don’t leave the chamber! Vidrodzhennya, three more votes from you!” he ordered, addressing the 25-member Vidrodzhennya (Revival) party.
Every vote counted. Try after try, the law found itself short of the necessary number of votes. Parubiy didn’t give up and kept urging the lawmakers: “Please, support it! We will vote for it anyway, but now we are delaying other laws. It’s not wise.” Eventually, 230 out of 291 present lawmakers said yes.
The anti-corruption movement Chesno called Parubiy “the hero of the day.” Lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, who is now running for parliament in a single-member district in Kyiv, called the decision historic.
Starting from the next election, it won’t be possible to buy votes and then steal from the state budget for five years, he wrote on his Telegram channel. “There will be an open-list system, and we as voters will decide who gets which spot on the list.”
Lawmaker Mustafa Nayyem wrote on Facebook: “I will tell my grandchildren how dinosaurs became extinct and their grandfather was a member of the last parliament that had (lawmakers)… elected in single-member districts.”
The final version of the package of law has not yet been published.
On May 22, two days after President Zelensky dispersed the parliament, lawmakers paid him back by rejecting his draft of a new election law. The president proposed abolishing single-member electoral districts and lowering the entry threshold from five to three percent.
