POTIIVKA, Ukraine – Residents of Potiivka, a village two hours west of Kyiv by car, are skeptical about the upcoming Oct. 25 local elections and seriously doubt whether those elected will bring change. Nevertheless, most of them will show up at the polling station. They always do.
“I don’t want someone else to use my ballot,” says Nataliya Dovha, a middle-aged woman who works as a vendor at a local store that sells winter boots, plastic flowers for graveyards, pans and dishes.
There are no posters, flyers or election campaign brochures to be seen in this village of some 1,500 residents nestled among the woods of Zhytomyr Oblast. But some candidates have donated new furniture and windows to a local school, while others have seen to it that several kilometers of cracked sidewalk have been repaired.
However, the villagers are wise to these kinds of tricks, and it hasn’t won the politicians any favor.
“We all know that the candidates will do something for people only before the elections,” Dovha says.
Most people have already decided who they will vote for, but try to keep it in secret to avoid problems, such as being accused of selling their vote, Dovha says.
Nevertheless, these particular elections are special for Potiivka.
This year, the villagers will for the first time elect the head and 14 members of the merged community council – a newly formed administrative and territorial unit that incorporates Potiivka and four other smaller villages nearby.
Potiivka is one of 159 newly merged communities in Ukraine that will take part in the local elections on Oct. 25. Created under administrative and territorial reforms, the merged communities are supposed to collect and manage their own finances and resources, and set their own spending priorities.
Potiivka’s village head, Volodymyr Maystruk, says the recently obtained status of a merged community will breathe new life into Potiivka.
“Starting January, 60 percent of income tax revenues will remain at the disposal of our merged community. The state will also provide some additional finances to merged communities,” Maystruk says, speaking with the Kyiv Post at the village council building, located on a street named after Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.
The Ukrainian government has allocated some $144 million for the development of the merged communities this year.
A woman walks out of the village council building in Zhytomyr Oblast’s Potiivka on Oct.19. Residents are skeptical about whether anything will change after Oct.25 election,that will bring local officials taxation and spending powers.(Volodymyr Petrov)
As in the rest of Ukraine, in Potiivka voters pay scant attention to the election programs issued by the candidates running for office, but learn about parties and candidates from newspapers.
Pensioner Kovalchuk says that members from the right-wing Svoboda Party and Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party are the most popular candidates among Potiivka’s residents because “people are disappointed in (President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc) Solidarity and the Samopomich (Self-Reliance) parties.”
But generally, the locals now have little faith in any of the political parties.
“I don’t see any changes in the country for the better, because the politicians are doing nothing,” Dovha says.
Kovalchuk agrees with her, saying: “They all go into politics to steal more.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be reached at [email protected]
