So the major players going into the March 2006 elections have pretty much solidified, at least as solid as they ever get.

Parliamentary groups are gathered into blocs as well as parties, but the leading parties are currently:

Yanukovych's Regions of Ukraine, Tymoshenko's Fatherland, Yushchenko's Popular Union Our Ukraine (PUOU), the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and maybe Lytvyn's People's Party and Vitrenko's Progressive Socialist Party.

Smaller Fry

There are a lot of less-than-3% parties and groupings out there, too, including Kinakh's "Whatever He's Calling it This Week" Party, the old Kuchmaite SDPU(u) whose decline I never miss a chance to chortle about, and Pora.

According to EDM, Reform and Order (RaO, an old Yushchenko ally) has decided to break away and join Pora, ostensibly because of the big business contamination in PUOU. This seems in contrast to the picture in this Ukrainska Pravda article, which has the Reform and Order people in with PUOU still. I'm not quite sure what the deal is, yet.

If indeed RaO and Pora split off, I would be inclined to dismiss them as unlikely to break the 3%, except that EDM thinks they're going to headline Vitaliy Klitchko. As a Californian, I'm partial to muscular politicians, and I would caution people not to underestimate the drawing power of a, erhem, heavy-hitter regardless of his lack of political credentials.

No Real Voter Connection

I would like to insert a word of caution that calculating how Ukrainians will vote in March is problematic. In addition to the weakness of polling data, political determinations are made more difficult by the lack of connection between politicians and voters.

The vast majority of voters don't think any party does a good job of representing them, and therefore 93% are not a member of any party. It is thus understandable that they are unenthusiastic when they learn this will be the first election in which all votes will go to parties, rather than a mix of parties and individual politicians. From a democratic institutions standpoint, this should eventually help parties start to emerge with real ideologies, but in the meantime voters are upset with their choices.

Part of the longstanding divide between politicians and voters is the persistent unwillingness of politicians to do anything to address leading voter concerns. Zerkalo Nedeli, in which I found the above figures, does a great job of describing the likely divide we will see between what politicians will be talking about, and what matters to voters:

What Troubles Us

Today most Ukrainians are concerned about such problems as poverty, unemployment, and corruption.

Next in importance are problems related to economic environments: the separation of business and authority and protection of domestic producers (more than 20% of respondents pointed to them as the most pressing).

External problems like accession to the EU, NATO, the WTO, and the CEA [Common Economic Area with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan] appear to be important to fewer Ukrainians (between 2% and 6% of respondents).

Only 5% of respondents are most of all concerned about Ukraine’s transformation into a federative republic, the introduction of a double Russian-Ukrainian citizenship, the nation’s split on religious grounds, and the threat of regional separatism.

What Troubles Parties

These problems, however, are unlikely to dominate the canvassing campaigns of political parties. At best, they might serve as convenient pretexts for criticizing one another. It is already understood that the one who just gives more promises is not a sure winner. On the other hand, competition among strategies and programs will hardly pay: firstly, strategies and programs are written for specialists, and they’re not postcards; secondly, it takes costly intellectual resources to develop them.

Under such circumstances, political parties are inclined to focus on the most “flammable” problems, even if they are not so pressing for the country. The word “party” literally means “part, portion, share, division”. And each of these parts wants to stand out with something distinguishable. The easiest way is to use the available division lines that run between opposite views on external, religious, or language issues. For example, very few West-Ukrainians are concerned about the problem of joining the union of Russia and Belarus, but the majority of East-Ukrainians regard it as vital. Besides, the electoral preferences in those parts of the country are expressed very clearly. There could not be a better recipe for an election campaign. Another example is the Social Democrats’ initiative to call a national referendum on joining NATO and the CEA. Even the initiators themselves cannot predict the outcome of this project, but it is sure to aggravate tensions in the country...

Avoiding the big issues has been a Ukrainian political strategy since independence. It is the reason why, every time a vote rolls around, all of a sudden the Russia-leaning politicians start talking about making Russian a second official language. Language does matter to a significant number of Ukrainians, but regardless of the results of previous elections this issue promptly disappears afterwards.

Why? Because it's not very important relative to corruption, poverty, unemployment, or rule of law (mentioned as a top voter concern elsewhere in the ZN article). Ukrainians would happily just muddle along on language, even NATO and the Single Economic Space, if the country cracked down on corruption, cleaned up the courts, and provided more economic opportunities. Unfortunately, longstanding ties between businessmen and politicians have ensured that many of those politicians have no interest in the kind of changes that would be meaningful to voters.

Voting Anti-Oligarch

Of course the prominence of the Regions of Ukraine party a year after its leader was caught stealing an election is what has made the news the most. And in a move guaranteed to make reasonable decisionmaking easier for Ukrainian voters, Yanukovych has now added Rinat Akhmetov as one of his top ten Regions of Ukraine members going into this election. Also on the list are: twelve managers of companies united in Akhmetov's corporation, Capital System Management, four candidates associated with the Shakhtar Donetsk soccer club owned by Akhmetov, Yanukovych's son, his lawyer, and his press secretary. (from Lavelle article quoted below)

As I've said before, PUOU tends to shoot itself in the foot. One way it has done this is by failing to oust Poroshenko (and a few other big businesspeople) from the party list despite the fact that he is a huge political liability. Guilty, not guilty, voters hate him. It is a testament to the backwardness of Ukraine's "freedom from prosecution for deputies" law that guys like him and Akhmetov still want to run for office despite the effect their presence has on their own party's popularity, and despite being hated by the people they will be swearing to serve.

So Yushchenko's and Yanukovych's supporters are both compromised. Tymoshenko is a bit better off, but she is hampered by her own shady past under Lazarenko. Peter Lavelle's theory is that with all the big political groups compromised, Regions of Ukraine has been able to establish a strong position using a "they're just as bad" argument:

It is ironic that Yanukovych has probably understood Ukraine's electorate much better than his Orange rivals. His message is quite clear -- Remember me? Of course you do. I haven't changed and remember how the economy grew when I was prime minister? During Tymoshenko's time in office, Ukraine's GDP growth dropped to 4 percent after being 12 percent under my watch.

He can easily claim that he isn't any worse than his opponents when it comes to business as usual. Yanukovych has the added advantage of asking the question -- Who are Yushchenko and Tymoshenko? Are they the people you thought they were a year ago?

Yanukovych is angling that the electorate will do the political math and will conclude that he may have not been right a year ago, but in the present he is.

This may very well be Yanukovych's argument, but if so it isn't working. As evidence see Zerkalo Nedeli's poll in the row listing political preference in the 2004 election. Of the Regions of Ukraine supporters, only 2% voted for Yushchenko in 2004. Yanukovych may be trying to win over Yushchenko voters, but the only people he's really won over are other party supporters who voted for him in last year's election (40% did).

But of course he hasn't. No Orange supporters would vote for the Bandit King no matter how fed up with Yushchenko and Tymoshenko they become. If Yanukovych were a wiley politician, he'd angle to steal votes from other parties of the foolish, the Communists and the last of the SDPU(u), as well as poach from Kinakh and Lytvyn.

What should be easy for the Orange crew is making the argument that Party of the Regions politicians are much worse than any of them, even when Poroshenko is included. Yanukovych is now frontlining Akhmetov's entire executive force. If Yanukovych voters are at all reasonable, this should motivate them to vote for someone else. I spent four years in Ukraine without hearing a good thing about Akhmetov. The only other person I could say that about was Kuchma.

So calling all Donbas voters! I've listened to you curse Ukraine's political system for letting Akhmetov steal from you. I've heard everyone in the nation curse the "oligarchs" who control them. Well here is your country's richest man, the biggest oligarch there is. Are you seriously going to vote for him?

I've heard some of you say the only difference is that Yushchenko's party is the party of millionaires, and Yanukovych's party is the party of billionaires. Well, even if that is true, your decision is still not difficult. It's more unpleasant, but it's still not difficult. Do you want to go crawling back to the men who stole the most from you and your families, or do you at least have enough pride and dignity left to fight against the oligarchs by voting for lesser evils?

Or you could vote for Pora. They're a disorganized youth party with no major oligarch presence among very few non-oligarch parties. And I hear they're lead by a political heavyweight.