Any lineup of people waiting to buy something indicates a deficit. The elections to the Verkhovna Rada and councils on all levels, which are finally over, not only confirmed this Soviet trait, but have also revealed a number of regularities in this interesting phenomenon. The first and most important one indicates that a lack of political will and gray matter in the collective brain of any pro-government party results in a shortage of votes.
Whereas the government did not even have the wits to properly organize the elections in 18 months, the Party of Regions and Viktor Yanukovych are indeed prepared to “improve your life today.” It seems worth quoting Leonid Kravchuk, who said that all those “technical mishaps” were actually “planned by the government.”
If so, the current government has outsmarted itself, because young people, who formed a substantial electoral resource of the Orange forces, turned away from polling stations upon seeing the long lines.
If the pre-election polls are accurate, some 80 percent wanted to cast their ballots, but the Central Election Commission’s preliminary estimates indicate that only 67 percent of voters actually voted. In other words, even if there were efforts to deliberately disorganize the electoral process, those efforts were obviously directed precisely against the architects. Time and again, people who were lining up to vote used very unpleasant epithets against the current government. Who knows, they may have reflected their emotions in their ballots listing 44 contenders in addition to Our Ukraine.
Needless to say, I am loath to drop another fly in the ointment of Orange political hopes, but there is no denying what happened. Of all the megablocs, Our Ukraine’s election campaign turned out to be the most sluggish and uncreative one. Political snobbery and dizziness from nonexistent success played a dirty joke on this bloc. This time the voters’ assessment was different from the president’s unvarying and consoling A’s. Sobriety had to come sooner or later.
As for the other humiliated contenders in the campaign, including the Lytvyn and Ne Tak blocs, they ought to have listened to Yaroslav Davydovych, who insisted that the elections spread out in time. But the MPs apparently wanted to pack their suitcases and start on another journey into their political future quicker, so they wanted to solve the problem with one stroke. As a result, the forces that viewed the CEC’s proposal as inexpedient, declaring that society was tired of election campaigning, now have an excellent opportunity to boost their political experience out in the field.
Another sad result of the most democratic elections is the fact that some experts’ statements about this society having outgrown its politicians have not been completely justified. Parties with structured ideologies and more or less clear-cut programs ended up as outsiders or found themselves thrown off the parliamentary playing field altogether.
Ukrainian society has made its choice in favor of two populist forces whose leaders are expected to put us in good order. This is another miscalculation of the current government: it has underestimated Ukrainian society’s unrealized desire of justice, as embodied by Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko in their respective ways. Yanukovych’s electorate could not forgive the Orange forces for their victory in 2004, and Tymoshenko’s could not forgive them for the fact that the “bandits” are still not in jail.
