Background, concept, and essence of the proposed transformation of Ukraine’s political system
The coming elections will be nationwide, but the next president will not be one elected nationwide; rather someone representing a certain political force, a group of forces, parties, and business elite.
Future historians will probably describe the early months of 2004 as a historic period that marked a turning point, and so on. The current head of state has emphasized his refusal to run for another term on a number of television interviews and on other occasions, thus bringing a whole political epoch to a close.
It clear now that the coalition currently in power is prepared to steer a middle course in order to carry out the political reform. They will even allow Article 103 to be deleted from the amended Constitution bill (that the president would be elected by the parliament), meaning that they are prepared to meet the opposition’s principal demand: presidential elections by direct universal suffrage with a five-year term. 304 ayes when voting on the political reform is, of course, a very important event that signifies a turning point; it is a hinged situation bringing about fundamental changes. The democratic transfer of power via elections no longer looks like a hypothetical option, nor does the regime’s adoption of the parliamentary logic. The parliament must become the key venue of rational will; political power must be wielded and delimited by the president, premier, and the parliamentary majority coalition formed by the parties in the parliament. The final vote on the political reform bill in Verkhovna Rada, scheduled for early April, will finalize the transfer from a superpresidential to a parliamentary-presidential republic and party-parliamentary system.
Changes on this year’s political horizon are also important. Achieving the political reform will signify changes in causes and effects. The concept and tasks of the said reform were formulated in view of the fall presidential elections. Now the reverse is true; the tasks and scenarios of the 2004 presidential campaign are being formulated in the reform format. Decentralizing the presidential office lowers the value of that “fateful presidential October 2004,” and the same goes for the stakes being placed on presidential authority. The political elite is betting on the parliament, its parties, and coalitions. Hence, the coming presidential elections are more likely to mark another important milestone on the road to finally solving in the spring of 2004 the problem of who will wield political power during the presidential elections later this year. This will mark the end of a large and in many respects crucial cycle of Ukrainian political history.
BACKGROUND
The political reform, the 2004 presidential campaign, parliamentary elections in the spring of 2006: these are the main phases of a political cycle with the utmost importance for the Ukrainian political project. There is a word combination, cascade event, indicating a series of occurrences actually forming a single whole. The political crisis of 2001, the parliamentary elections of 2002, the political reform of 2003, the presidential campaign of 2004, and the parliamentary elections of 2005 mark a five-year plan, during which Ukraine must make its political choice. It is a period marked by dealing the cards in a historic game, when the destinies of this country and its citizens will be decided for years to come.
It all started after completing the initial postcommunist phase of the Ukrainian project, whose completion was diagnosed by the turnout of the 1999 presidential campaign. Then came a period of cleansing the genetic and structural basis of the regime formed in the mid-1990s, and this was socially legitimized in the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine. This primarily addressed the models of personalistic and above-party presidential leadership, weak political parties, parliamentary opposition (in the executive branch), referenda and paternalistic forms of representation domineering over representative democratic institutions, and so on. Second came the countercommunist lining of the political regime — when the post-Soviet political system was formed as a shaky noncommunist parliamentary majority coalition, and as a positive alternative to the post- Soviet Leftist parties and groups. To this were attached small architectural forms in the field of those in power; the conditions arose for a temporary political balance.
The third vanishing feature of Ukrainian politics consists in the powers that be maneuvering between the post-Soviet Rightists and Leftists (democrats vs. Communists; National Democrats vs. the Left Communist Bloc in Ukraine; Ukraine’s West vs. East; West vs. Russia). The Ukrainian variant of domestic political rift and balancing was in a way geopolitically projected on the multivector doctrine and policy. Containing what was defined as the threat of leftist revanche and national radicalism produced the basic parameters of the legitimacy of the political system, its relative stability, and geopolitical mission (which turned out to be absolutely practical).
At the turn of 2001, the postcommunist basic parameters began to scatter, just as Russia had entered the phase of national integration and political consolidation by transferring to a mobilization democracy regime, enhancing the presidential vertical, strengthening the state, etc. The Ukrainian version of the consolidation phase did not rule out the vertical democratization strategy aimed at achieving that mobilization balance. The cassette scandal and the attendant political actions introduced radical changes in the scenario.
The Ukrainian elite’s specific structures and interests (ruling groups becoming political parties, with the power structures and administrative officials becoming increasingly weaker, and the national democratic opposition coming up with its leader) played the decisive role in turning Ukraine away from the Russian model, and in preparing its own political modernization project. Reallocating the nation’s party balance had become obvious even before 2001, with the post-Soviet Left (CPU) losing its ground, especially in light of the Communist leadership being condemned for its opportunism; with radical changes taking place in the Right party conglomerate. Second, the Centrist parties began showing a new line of conduct. Stimulated by the speed of political change and the plummeting liquidity of the administrative assets of being in power, the Centrist party leaders had become aware that, paraphrasing Max Weber, one had to live not off power or for power, but off public politics and for politics. The crisis of confidence in the administrative-power-structure-presidential-authority basis gave an impetus to opposition, forming the axis of political tensions, with the political parties (as autonomous political agents interested in the development of parliamentary forms of democracy), on the one hand, and the presidential vertical being placed over and above all parties, on the other hand. One of the positive, stimulating, and realistic ways out of the critically unstable situation lay in asserting the Ukrainian party system as an alternative to the logic and mechanism of post-Soviet democracy. Had the powers that be rejected the reallocation of the spheres of influence, in keeping with the democratic parliamentary party-competitive logic, the resultant left-right-centrist-cross-opposition effect would have been inevitable.
The Yushchenko factor, the ruling elite’s relative fiasco during the 2002 elections, the approaching 2004 presidential elections, important as they are, serve only to stress the necessity of the reform project. Transfer from a regime relying on the superpresidential administrative format to parliamentary logic is thus a matter of time, political will, and technology.
ARGUMENT OVER MANDATE
This author would like to make something absolutely clear. The point at issue is not the current president, but the evolution of presidency as an institution which is undergoing important metamorphoses, due to the changes in the political system. A degree of confusion is caused by the preservation of presidential elections by direct and universal suffrage, as well as the immutability of presidential authority. Polls indicate a degree of confusion among the potential electorate and elite-building groups; the former and the latter are not certain who they will vote for as the next president this fall.
The stable registered popularity ratings of a number of leading politicians running for president cannot as yet be considered as their real chance. Yushchenko’s 23-25%; Yanukovych’s 15-17%, and the Communist leader’s slightly lower indices are evidence that approximately 50% voters remain undecided and also that Ukraine does not have a universal national politician capable of becoming an integral candidate and winning the race in the first round, uniting political power, the elite, and society. Sociology apart, it is clear that the coming elections will be nationwide, but the next president will not be one elected by the whole nation but rather someone representing a certain political force, group of forces, parties, and business elites. Thus, apart from all the talk about political reform, this party-elected president cannot but produce the effect of power being monopolized by a single party and financial-industrial group — no matter how big or small, Left or Right, etc. Reallocating constitutional powers for the benefit of parliament or cabinet will transform this system into a semipresidential and presidentialistic one (as it is known in France), or as parliamentary-presidential one, as it is known in Ukraine. The president will remain head of state, but parliament will form the executive branch, so the prime minister and his cabinet, appointed by the legislative branch, will implement the nation’s political course.
DO WE NEED THE RUSSIAN TREND?
A number of analysts and politicians, directly or indirectly referring to the Putin phenomenon, are prepared to regard the integral leader vacuum that has been registered by sociologists as something akin to drama, another hard trial to be endured by Ukraine.
Russian stockbrokers say, We don’t have a national trend, we are following in Brazil’s footsteps. Obviously, many in Ukraine are subconsciously awaiting a Russian political trend. But Ukrainian politics we no longer follows in Russia’s footsteps, nor are we programmed to play out any of the Russian scenarios of transferring power and elite-transformation.
First, Ukraine does not have a group prepared and equipped to undertake to unite power and society the way it was done in Russia, by its administrative-power-structure elite, stifling all the political claims of domestic business, party oligarchs, liberal circles, and the state bureaucracy. In Ukraine, such elites are very much on a local scale; they are too regional and party-oriented to produce a unifying monopoly center by stepping over the proverbial dead bodies. Simultaneously, they are not too weak to draw up their own power-wielding and interelite leadership scenarios. Second, one could watch Ukrainian big business split in 2001-02, after that business was politically structured in the aftermath of the 2002 parliamentary elections. A large part of that business had supported Our Ukraine and got seats in the Ukrainian Parliament on the crest of the wave. The Ukrainian presidency had lost its above parties and above elites status as arbiter due to the political rift in Ukrainian business (with some of it siding with the opposition). Now the president found himself acting as an umpire for a single albeit large interelite group. The presidential campaign of 2004 and parliamentary elections of 2006 will tend to enhance rather than undermine this trend. This should in turn result in fundamental changes in the structure of political responsibility. The newly elected president would be responsible not before the whole people in the abstract, but before his own electorate.
INTEGRAL LEADER OR INTEGRATING CLASS?
Because of the local nature and disunity of its elites, Ukraine is a country of parties by definition. It would be better off integrated not by a plebiscite leader, a nationwide-elected president, or such, but by a system of democratic institutions that rely on an integrating social class. Not an integral leader, but an integrating class, a national business class as a carrier of basic consensus. Such are the outlines of a new postreform project.
Meanwhile, let us determine that a complex of all these factors eliminates plebiscite-leadership-type scenarios, a number of the features of which could be observed in Ukraine in the 1990s, and a new edition of which is currently taking place in neighboring Russia.
Our neighbor has the “people” elect their leader and delegate him the authority to conduct a semi-authoritarian course; that the “people” and its president interact without an intermediary system in the form of political parties, independent media, public movements, and other agents in the public sphere. The political regime, in turn, strengthens the executive branch upon which it relies, and brings the legislature firmly under control by shaping a national team of loyal politicians, producing a single party in power having the constitutional majority at its disposal.
In Ukraine, the superpresidential mandate has lost its unifying and overall national meaning and is been supplanted by a de facto party-group and ideological one. The fact that sociology does not record a leader with undeniably high ratings points to a crisis of confidence, rather to distrust polling and demonstrates a lack of confidence in plebiscite presidential authority, regardless of the persons involved.
The presidential mandate becomes like the relay baton transferred from one political force to the next, with daily political life becoming unceasingly focused on political parties and interparty coalitions. Ukrainian politics adopted the parliamentary rhythm in 2002, with most important political causes and effects determining the outcome of parliamentary elections and coalitions. The fact that the Ukrainian elite is focusing on the 2006 Battle for the Parliament, regarding this October’s presidential campaign as another rung on the ladder leading to the parliamentary battle serves as further graphic evidence of Ukrainian politics being adjusted to the parliamentary tune. Incidentally, all this is in sharp contrast with the absence of any scenarios during Russia’s recent elections to the State Duma.
The presidency as an institution signifying the supreme executive authority has become extinct in Ukraine. Paraphrasing a statement made by one noted political anthropologist, political institutions are like gods; they die when no one believes in them any longer. The strategic intrigue, should the political reform succeed, will consist in who will be able to form the parliamentary majority in 2006.
