Carried away by drawing out forecasts for the future parliamentary majority, analysts seem to have almost forgotten about the outsiders of the election race, let alone the political structures that did not even try to run for parliament. But out of about 130 political parties registered by the Justice Ministry (the ministry’s Department for Legalization of Public Associations refused to disclose the exact number to The Day’s correspondent, saying this great secret could be disclosed only after an official inquiry with a host of formalities), the 2002 elections involved 63 parties: 21 ran independently and 42 in election blocs. A few more were denied registration by the Central Election Committee. Nobody knows what the rest were thinking about, what they want. Interesting is that in the 1998 campaign, 25 parties and nine blocs of 19 aligned parties applied for participation. But as of January 1, 1998. only 53 political parties were officially registered. This means that four years ago, representation in the supreme lawmaking body was contested by the overwhelming majority of the political structures that existed at that time. Now it is less than half. Thus a fleeting glimpse of the past elections, from the perspective of their effect on the Ukrainian party system may be of some interest.
Incidentally, the leaders of the parties that failed to score the required 4% – the Green Party, the Progressive Socialist Party, and the Democratic Union – refused to share their ideas of the future party system. We hope this does not mean that now they fail to see any further than their hurt feelings.
According to the Interfax- Ukraine news agency, President of the Moscow International Discussion Club (whose observers worked in a number of Ukrainian regions in 1998 and this year) Andrei Ozharovsky cited an interesting utterance by his colleague, a Swedish journalist: “These elections are not for the voters, but for the parties.” The 2002 elections really became a serious test for Ukrainian parties – above all, a test of organizational skills. According to CEC Chairman Mykhailo Riabets, the elections have shown that the prevailing majority of contestant parties and blocs lacked structures at the regional level and failed to delegate their representatives to local election commissions, as required by the new election law. According to Riabets, more than two-thirds of parties and blocs failed to delegate their representatives to over 70% of election commissions. In addition, he stressed, the parties and blocs demonstrated negligence in staffing constituency commissions. As a result, 90% of commission members were people without any experience in organization and elections in independent Ukraine. In the opinion of foreign observers, it is the commission members’ “poor qualification and knowledge” that explains “massive violations of the law.” One of the reasons why the commissions were technically unprepared for the elections was the inability of their members delegated by parties to agree with local authorities: as a result, the latter, for instance, did not provide polling stations with safes and chairs in sufficient quantities. Even the organizers were at odds with one another: “What impressed us most of all was the tension and the atmosphere of distrust between observers and members of election commissions on the voting day. It was reported everywhere, which is strange, because both the commission members and the observers represented the same political parties,” Moscow observers noted.
In this connection, one of the amendments to the active election law suggested by the CEC concerns the regulations for forming election commissions. Many politicians and experts believed this point to be “more democratic” than in the previous law. One can only hope that one of the lessons learned by Ukrainian parties from this election campaign will be a conclusion about the necessity to unite rather than split, to develop regional party “infrastructures.”
Secondly, the elections have helped many Ukrainian political associations to remember that one of the basic signs of a political party is an ideology. No matter what is said about the united Social Democrats, whatever anecdotes are told about them, their wager on ideology in this election campaign has yielded certain dividends. Also, their faction in the parliament was always much more logical during voting than, say, both Rukh factions who had only recently been in the vanguard of the national democratic movement. Incidentally, Director of the Institute of Politics Mykola Tomenko was not quite right to state that all the parties that did not pass the 4% barrier should convene extraordinary congresses and “change their course and leaders.” If the NRU [People’s Rukh {movement} of Ukraine] and the UNR [Ukrainian People’s Rukh] had run independently, not as part of the bulky and ideologically inarticulate Our Ukraine, they would have not collected anything more than their leaders Hennady Udovenko and Yury Kostenko did in the 1999 presidential race: 1.22% and 2.17% respectively. Both Rukhs have about a dozen seats in the new parliament. Thus the recommendation to change course and the leaders could be addressed to them as well. And as for the prospects for the entire Our Ukraine, its clear division into three groups – national democrats, business representatives, and political forces which are loyal to the regime but did not join another bloc under the circumstances – makes one doubt its longevity. Perhaps, tactically it would be more advantageous for ZaYedU to form several factions in Verkhovna Rada on the basis of the bloc’s parties. But in that case, all plans to create a single political party on the basis of the bloc would have to be postponed.
Thirdly, we can say that the three sociological laws formulated by the French political scientist Maurice Duverger, who established a correlation between the electoral and the party systems, do not seem to work under our conditions. Judge for yourselves: Duverger said that the two round (absolute majority) election system occasions the existence of several parties with flexible positions that seek contacts and compromises; the one mandate (one round) system occasions rivalry between two parties; while the proportional election system results in a great number of parties with a hard inner structure and independent of one another. It remains difficult to understand what else but chaos inside and outside the parliament is occasioned by the Ukrainian hybrid of the mixed territorial-proportional system. Political scientists believe that Ukraine shows signs of both an atomized party system (in which it is not necessary to scrupulously count the number of parties: it hardly matters beyond a certain point) and a party system of polarized pluralism (characterized by the presence of opposition parties, a Left and a Right opposition that are in permanent conflict). Apparently, considering the outcome of the elections, the probability of the latter system being formed in Ukraine is higher. But under such conditions of permanent conflict both a systemic breakt hrough and progressive movement are complicated. Ukraine is obviously late – for both objective and subjective reasons – with political reform, particularly with the new election law based exclusively on a proportional election system. Only in that case one could talk about any structured political system in Ukraine which, in its turn, is an instrument of ensuring the regime’s transparency. But proportional elections are too risky for those in power: If many of the 145 nonpartisan newly elected lawmakers did not join the ZaYedU Bloc, it would never be able to form the most numerous faction in this convocation. And in 1998, nonpartisan lawmakers served as insurance against the Left, which collected a total of one-third of their votes.
Of course, there has to be certainty: either the government is formed by the parliament or by the president. But now, when the new deputy corps has not cooled down after the race yet and Leonid Kuchma has already passed the halfway mark of his term in office, it is not the best time to force political reforms: if the leadership tries to do it today, it could create serious difficulties for itself. One more vicious circle?
But the main thing is that those who talk about the politicians’ own “internal affairs” are mistaken: the lawmakers’ ability to adopt reasonable laws – tax laws, for example – concern the entire society. And now the future of Ukrainian political parties depends on how they work for the interests of real people – the people who want competitive pay, access to quality medical aid and education, and who want to see public servants working for the public, not themselves.
