Tired elections in Ukraine

Vestnik Kavkaza

The Central Election Committee preceded 77.77% of protocols of the elections to the Ukrainian parliament (party lists). The Party of Regions maintains their leadership with 32.77% of votes; the united opposition Batkivscchina won 23.55%, the Communist Party – 14.23%, UDAR of Vitaly Klichko – 13.29%, and Freedom – 9.27%. 450 PMs will be elected. Half of them are elected under the proportional system, the rest under majority districts.

Yeugeny Kopat’ko, head of the company Research and Branding Group

When all the majority candidates gather, many surprises will appear. I think Kiev and the Kiev Region will surprise us first of all. In the southeast no surprises will be. The central districts of Ukraine are predictable. But in the west, the center, and Kiev there will be interesting people who will get into the parliament. The majority candidates determined an intense competition. They will tend to the opposition forces, and configuration in the parliament will depend on their number and preferences.

At the moment, representatives of the opposition are leaders in the correlation of forces. But Klichko’s team will have its own game. Betkivshchina and Freedom will probably have interesting internal relations. The Party of Regions and the communists will have their own peculiarities in relations. In general too many efforts were spent for internecine feuds. We have been living in internecine feuds for 20 years. The world went on before and we have to catch up and find a compromise.

Yugeny Minchenko, head of the International Institute of Political Expertise

A mistake by many political forces in these elections is that they underestimated not only a protest capacity of electorate, but also a demand for ideology. The majority of Ukrainian politics is too commercial, too ideologically inconsistent, without a clear position. Such criticism concerned Batkivshchina, the Party of Regions, the communists, and Klichko with his eclectic list. Why did the communists and Freedom gain a good result? They stated a clear position.

The commercialization of politics wasn’t working in the districts. The big mistake of the opposition is that they didn’t pay attention to the election campaign in districts: they though, wealthy tycoons will win there, let’s present a non-important candidate. At the same time, in many districts candidates from Batkivshchina got a good result, better than social polls showed ahead of the elections. For example, if a person had 12% of rating, he got more than 20% without any effort, only due to the brand. If the opposition paid more attention to the majority districts, the situation would be different. It is a technical mistake, they didn’t consider polarization and the lack of a brand.

Vladimir Zharikhin, the deputy head of the Institute of the CIS Countries

Our sociology completely missed the effect of Zhirinovsky in 1993. The same situation took place in Ukraine: sociologists detected those voters who were ready to vote for the communists of Freedom for ideological reasons. They were ideological supporters. However, dissatisfied people who voted in despite, who turned off from the Party of Regions and decided to vote for the communists or turned off from the unified opposition and decided to vote for Freedom didn’t realize that they would do it in despite when they were interviewed.

If the Party of Regions manages to maintain the majority due to majority candidates, it would be a satisfactory result for Russia. Russia will prefer to deal with the Ukrainian consolidated power when the president, the prime minister, and the majority of the parliament are in one team. Such situation happens once in a blue moon in Ukraine. I think it will go on. It is more comfortable for Russia to deal with the consolidated power. The Kremlin should be pleased.

Viktor Mironenko, head of the Center of Ukrainian Research under the Europe Institute of RAS

I was not surprised by the results. These elections were the elections of the tired. The authorities are tired of dealing with a difficult economic situation; the opposition is tired of being the opposition; the voters are tired of elections which don’t bring any changes. Bad news is that nothing will be changed by the elections. Good news is ambitions of participated parties and activity of the population. A possibility of political changes maintains. Will the information trend remain in Ukraine? Will reforms be continued? Will the political process, live politics which is absent in Belarus and almost absent in Russia maintain? I think so. An officially ruling party has never got such high results in Ukraine.