by Dominique Arel (Chair of Ukrainian Studies, U of Ottawa)
Roundtable on Ukrainian Elections
CREES, University of Toronto, 11 April 2006
[via the Ukraine List]

The March parliamentary elections in Ukraine could not match the Orange Revolution in excitement, suspense, and bewilderment. Yet they could prove quite significant for the development of Ukraine as an open society, and thereby as a permanent political threat to its immediate neighbors, Russia and Belarus.

These elections are significant for three reasons:

The first  is that they may induce the Orange political class, and many of us, to come out of denial regarding Eastern Ukraine.

The second is that they may force leading politicians to be in permanent coalition building mode, not just in the next weeks or months, but an ongoing basis. While this runs the danger of producing political paralysis, post-war (or current) Italian-style, it could, on the other hand, establish strong foundations for political pluralism.

The third is that the heretofore highly ambiguous constitutional reform could actually amount to more sturdy arrangements, not through some rushed document adopted at the eleventh hour, but rather owing to the very unpleasant reality that all major political players are regionally based and that each needs to be included in decision-making for Ukrainian policies to acquire legitimacy and substance.

**

First, the denial. At one basic level, the March 2006 vote is a carbon copy of December 2004 election. Yanukovych obtained 44 percent of the vote in the 2004 repeat voting. If the vote for the Party of Regions and satellite parties (Communists and Vitrenko) is correlated with the vote for the Orange parties (Tymoshenko, Our Ukraine, Socialists) and satellites (PORA and Kostenko), then the proportion of the vote obtained by the anti-Orange blocs is virtually identical (44 to 46 percent) to what it was sixteen months ago.

And the vote is as regionally polarized as it was during Orange. Again, if the anti-Orange and Orange blocs are counted together, we get landslide anti-Orange votes everywhere in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, and landslide Orange votes everywhere in Central and Western Ukraine. A landslide occurs when the proportion is at least 60-40%. This is the relative proportion that the anti-Orange vote obtained in Kherson, while its range everywhere else in the East and South was between 69% and 92%. In the Center and West, the Orange vote never fell below a proportion of 66% (Poltava and Zhytomyr), and generally landed within a 75%-97% range. Remarkably, not in not a single oblast or territory of Ukraine was the race between the anti-Orange and Orange blocs competitive.

Even within the Orange family, there wasn't much competition between the Tymoshenko Bloc and Our Ukraine. In only six of twenty-seven oblasts and territories were the two blocs close (five in Western Ukraine, the other being Crimea where most of the Orange electorate is comprised of Crimean Tatars). Tymoshenko soundly outpaced Yushchenko in proportions ranging from 2/1 to 4/1 in twenty-one oblasts, including Eastern and Southern Ukraine, but one must bear in mind that the overall Orange vote was rather small.

My reading of these results is twofold. First, Eastern Ukraine is not going away. The 2004 anti-Orange polarized vote was attributed to falsifications (which was certainly the case in the second round, but not in the third) and to a censored media (definitely the case in the second round, far less so in the third). The March 2006 election was conducted under conditions deemed fair and free by local and international monitoring bodies, the regime did not capture the broadcast media, and yet the results are identical. Eastern Ukraine still massively rejects the Orange parties, in the same proportion that it rejected Yushchenko in 2004. Maybe it is time for us to stop explaining the Eastern Ukraine vote as that of an electorate with an undeveloped national consciousness, who does not vote according to its true interests, and is manipulated by their unsavory elites and, of course, by Mother Russia. There is something deeper at work.

The second point is that the Party of Regions is not the only regional party in Ukraine. In fact, all parties are regional parties: Tymoshenko and the Socialists in Central Ukraine, Our Ukraine in Western Ukraine. Even the four parties which had a chance to make it to parliament, but did not in the end, crossed the threshold in specific regions: Lytvyn in the Center, Vitrenko in the East and South, PORA in Galicia, Kostenko/Pliushch in Galicia/Volyn. The Russian press presents the regionalization of Ukrainian politics as a source of instability. I think, on the contrary, that it is a strength. But a strength that can be capitalized upon only if the reality of regionalism is recognized.

***

The second reason why these elections are significant is because they introduce coalition-building in what could become a permanent feature of Ukrainian politics. Previously, the executive branch was concocting parliamentary majorities by buying off deputies who had run as so-called independents in first-past-the-post districts. The result was a Cabinet which was mostly unaccountable to the will of the electorate (mostly, but not entirely, as the Orange Revolution revealed).

Under the new electoral system, none of the deputies were elected to parliament as independent. Moreover, the new constitutional rules prohibit them from changing camps. What must happen, therefore, is a formal coalition of existing blocs. Mathematically, there are three possibilities: a coalition of the three Orange blocs, a coalition of Our Ukraine and the Party of Regions, or a coalition of Our Ukraine and Tymoshenko. Politically, none of the coalition scenarios involving the Party of Regions are possible, since a significant portion of both the Yushchenko and Tymoshenko blocs regard the Party of Regions as profoundly illegitimate, and any formal alliance with Yanukovych would incur a politically unsustainable rebellion with the Orange ranks. In the end, we will have what everybody expects, that is to say, an Orange coalition. Formally.

In practice, however, Ukrainian political culture will not be conducive to party discipline in parliamentary votes. Deputies may be prohibited from changing sides, but they will not be prohibited from defecting on particular votes. There is a parallel with American practice, where Senators and Congressmen constantly defect on important votes. This is what I mean by permanent coalition building. Each major vote will require ad hoc majority building. And since the Tymoshenko, Yushchenko and Moroz blocs will have constant squabbles over specific policies, the Party of Regions will have to be involved in the quest for parliamentary majorities. After all, how could it be different? The Party of Regions has made the demonstration that it speaks for a great majority of Ukrainian citizens living in Ukraine's geographical half. A state cannot be built on the basis of excluding half of its territory from crucial decision-making. However disreputable and unsavory many of the Rehiony characters might be, the Orange leaders will have sit down with them on an ongoing basis to hatch out the kind of compromises necessary for the political development of Ukraine. The Orange folks do not trust Rehiony, and, as we all know, the Our Ukraine folks don't trust Tymoshenko either, but it is precisely because they all have the structural incentives to work together, willy nilly, that Ukraine has a chance to truly consolidate itself as an open and internally competitive system.

The challenge is to find a way to de facto integrate the Party of Regions without formally integrating it in the Cabinet, since the latter would be politically explosive. There is virtually no one from Eastern Ukraine in the Tymoshenko Bloc's and Nasha Ukraina's slate of deputies, ensuring that the future Cabinet will continue to seriously underrepresent the East. This is an unhealthy situation for any state with strong regional cleavages. The new Orange cabinet will have to devise creative ways to allow an Eastern voice to be heard. Arrogance and contempt towards Eastern elites, which has generally characterized the first Orange administration, would not be a strategy bearing long-term fruits, from the point of view of democratic consolidation.

The Party of Regions has its own representational problem. Not in the sense that it does not legitimately reflect the concerns of the Eastern electorate. We can't have it both ways. We can't praise, on the one hand, the process of open elections as the true achievement of the Orange Revolution, while, on the other hand, delegitimizing the Party of Regions as a motley crue of rascals who should be in jail rather than in parliament. While, say, Piskun, Kovalov or Azarov will never win our vote for statesmen of the year, the fact is that they belong to a party that won a plurality in an open contest. If the Orange parties systematically finished way behind the Party of Regions throughout the East and South, it was not due, on the whole, to fear, intimidation or fabrication. At one level, the Party of Regions does represent the East. (We know that the electoral base of the Tymoshenko and Our Ukraine blocs will not accept that, but we, as disinterested analysts of the Ukrainian scene, should accept it as the corollary of an open contest). But the Party of Regions is a Donetsk political machine and, if we are to believe Kerstin Zimmer's analysis of its electorate slate, all its leaders and the bulk of its deputies come from the Donbas. The East and South, outside of Donbas, voted massively for a party that is essentially a Donbas party, rather than an all-inclusive East and South party, or so it appears. While the Party of Regions will struggle to have its voice heard nationally, the non-Donbas regions will struggle to have theirs heard within the Party of Regions. In other words, it will be very interesting to observe whether Regions will evolve from a political vehicle serving the interests of a local clan to a substantively regional party. Under the Orange Revolution-imposed rules of open politics, shall we add.

***

The third major consequence of the election is constitutional reform. We are familiar with the facts. A constitutional compromise, ostensibly shifting more powers to the parliament and prime minister, was passed in December 2004, as a condition for amending the electoral law and paving the way for Yushchenko's victory. Yushchenko does not seem to support the reform anymore, and his Ministry of Justice is on the record for calling the reform unconstitutional. Tymoshenko passionately opposed the reform, back then, and now, well, she is not about to repeat her experience of a prime minister whose powers are constantly encroached upon by the presidential branch. Politicians in the national-democratic camp have constantly changed their minds in the last ten years on whether Ukraine should adopt a more presidential or more parliamentary system. The reality, however, is that under the kind of open political system that the Orange Revolution has brought about, a mostly presidential system is no longer possible. A democratic Ukraine magnifies regional differences, not just along an Orange/anti-Orange axis, but within the Orange movement, and the imperative of regional inclusion and representation will make highly unlikely that a constitutional majority favoring a more centralized presidential rule could ever emerge, as one camp would always mistrust that another camp misuses its presidential authority in case of an election victory.

In short term politics, Yushchenko, humiliated by Tymoshenko in the last elections, does not have the political capital to resist constitutional reform. (In any case, the knock on him is that he did not even have the inclination to use the vast presidential powers that he inherited in January 2005). Tymoshenko, bent on reclaiming her seat as prime minister, does not want a presidential Security Council chief breathing down her neck. Yanukovych, obviously, wants more power to the one political arena where he has influence: parliament. As for Moroz, whom most analysts assess as a man of integrity, he will not yield on constitutional reform. And no Orange coalition is mathematically possible without Moroz. Three years down the road, if Tymoshenko were to win the Presidency, you can bet that the Nasha Ukraina folks would prefer to have her impetuous style checked by a powerful parliament. The experience of Central European states, since the end of Communism, has demonstrated without a doubt that a semi-presidential system of government, where parliament is endowed with more power than the president, is the best garantor, by far, of substantive democratization. Ukraine has a good chance of developing such a model of government, not because of superior political flair by its elites, but due to the strength of its regional rivalries.

The larger question is whether this "forced pluralism", or the "pluralism by default" that Lucan Way insightfully wrote about, will plant the seeds of a new political culture in Ukraine, one based on the respect for the rule of law. That respect is still in very scarce supply in post-Orange Ukraine. One thing is certain. If a new set of constitutional arrangements does evolve between parliament, the Prime Minister and the presidential office, it will evolve from conventions, not from any strict observance of the letter of the law. The conventions themselves will arise from the institutional necessity of finding compromises. A respect for these conventions, or new political "rules of the game," could over time mutate into a respect for the law and for a court system endowed with the task of ruling over jurisdictional disputes. But this is a long and risky path. The temptation by Ukrainian administrations, whether of an anti-Orange and, yes, of an Orange orientation, to subvert the court to serve their partisan goals, will always loom large. Paradoxically, the mistrust that Ukrainian political leaders have towards each other could set the foundations for a mutually-agreed apolitical adjudicating system standing above political interest. Mistrust in rivals could beget trust in institutions.

This may not happen and Ukraine could drown into political paralysis. Yet none of what I discussed could be conceivable without a a system built on openness and political contest. And that is the greatest achievement of the Orange Revolution.

[The roundtable, organized by the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, University of Toronto, featured Dominique Arel, Adrian Karatnycky (Founder and President, The Orange Circle), Inna Pidluska (Foundation Europe XXI, Kyiv), and Daniel Bilak (UNDP Advisor to the Government of Ukraine).]