Campaign Name Game
The failure of Verkhovna Rada to override the president’s veto of the law on proportional representation elections has had both a short and long term effect. The process of building parties already set in motion has slowed, thus postponing the political restructuring of society for several more years.
Caught unawares halfway, the builders of political parties had to modify their plans in the face of campaign realities. We have again failed to clearly identify the flanks of national politics before the elections. Dozens of phantom parties continue to graze on the electoral field of the Communists, Social Democrats, Greens, national democrats, and other ideological parties. It is impossible to clean up the party pastures in the next few years without an appropriate law on political parties and proportional representation. Against this background, serious political players are facing a dilemma: to continue relying on their own ideology or to choose a leader, with a high-sounding name which is far easier to popularize than, say, liberal ideas. There is also a third way: to create expendable political campaign trademarks patterned after the Russian Medved (Bear) or the Italian Forza Italia! (Go, Italy!).
As to party trademarks, the situation is more or less clear. Despite an attempt to clone similar-sounding parties, the voter will find it quite easy to identify the Communists or the united Social Democrats. The others present a problem: either there is no real force behind a high-sounding party name (the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal Parties) or a party trademark is the object of a bitter and constant struggle (the two Rukhs and the Greens).
It is also not so simple with new names. Although the Ukrainian language is rich, the fantasy of political image-makers stubbornly spins around numerous and confusing Ukraines, unions, fatherlands, motherlands, and harmonies.
Where politicians lack imagination and originality, the helping hand comes from the parents to whom we actually owe everything. I mean in this case the parents who gave their politician children the high-sounding names of Yushchenko or Moroz, and the parents of the husbands or wives of such politicians as Tymoshenko and Vitrenko. The National Salvation Forum plus the Fatherland Party was the first to follow this path, assuming the name of Yuliya Tymoshenko. The blocs led by Oleksandr Moroz and Viktor Yushchenko blocs are also close to adopting the names of their leaders. It is not ruled out that the now nameless ex-TUNDRA will also take on the name of one of its many leaders as its flag.
The advantages of such a step seem to be indisputable. The mentioned and unmentioned politicians can be liked, in purely human terms, by certain voters who will never, even at gunpoint, read a line in the party programs. There is also a purely technological point: the assumption by a bloc of the name of a leader does not at all oblige the latter to top the party list.
For instance, Ms. Tymoshenko has a full right to attach her name to the bloc and simultaneously run for a district seat. Thus, some people will manage to defy the Constitutional Court ban on simultaneously running on a party ticket and in an electoral district. In that case we would have two Morozes or Yushchenkos: one virtual as bloc flag bearer and the other real as a constituency challenger.
Of course, no lawmaker can foresee all the possible tampering with a mixed election law just because this law is mixed. It is a foregone conclusion that the technologies based on name recognition technologies will skew the results. This technology allows a name to disguise quite a motley crew of people often having diametrically-opposed views. Who will the blocs represent and whose interests will they defend in parliament? Will a bloc exist at all after its leaders have solved the problem of getting into Verkhovna Rada? We will know the answers only after the elections. In case of disappointment, we will have to wait for another four years.
CURRENT LINEUP
Another attempt has been made to determine the relative support of the leading parties and blocs: the Freedom Foundation conducted a nationwide public opinion poll on November 1 through 5. 1200 Ukrainian citizens over 18 were polled. The results are as follows: KPU 22.1%, Our Ukraine 14.9% followed by those which also cleared the 4% barrier: SDPU(o) 5.6%, For United Ukraine 4.7%, SPU 4.5%, Yabluko 4.3%, and the Greens 4.1%. Of those which failed to clear the barrier, Anatoly Kinakh’s Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, now rising fast at 2.9%, stands a good chance. The Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc polled 2.8%, trailed by Vitrenko’s Progressive Socialists (2.2%), UNA (1.6%), the Democratic Union (1.3%), and the Ukrainian Unity Party (0.9%).
According to Freedom Foundation President Ihor Dementiev, the ratings of many parties, blocs, and individual politicians are highly variable. For example, the popularity of Anatoly Kinakh is growing in proportion to the decline of that of Viktor Yushchenko. The rating of Our Ukraine is unstable and tends to drop. The expert says that the NRU-UNR-PRP list can only provide 4 parliamentary seats (10%) for each of the parties. This will make it impossible for them to form fractions in Verkhovna Rada and means continuation of the course toward eliminating all the parties now part of Our Ukraine and uniting them into a new single party. According to Mr. Dementiev, if the quotas are not substantially increased, NRU will face not only resistance from its regional branches, a thing predicted by the Freedom Foundation, but also the discontent within the leaderships of these parties.
SDPU(o) support grew from 4.7% in August to 5.6% in November. However, the Freedom Foundation president believes that SDPU(o) has not yet tapped its entire growth potential, as 11% of the population point out that Social Democracy is their favorite political trend in Ukraine.
The For a United Ukraine bloc has seen its popularity drop from 7.6% in August to 4.7% in November. It is understood that this happened not least due to the leadership problem in this bloc.
After analyzing the said data, the Freedom Foundation concluded that no political force will have an absolute majority in the new Verkhovna Rada. For example, were the elections be held today, Our Ukraine would get 34 seats out of 225 party list seats and another 12-15 seats from electoral districts. This totals fewer than 50 parliamentary seats, a far cry from 225 seats required for the formation of the parliamentary majority promised by Mr. Yushchenko. So far, there can only be a question of a compromise majority that would include all centrist forces, no matter how their leaders might loathe one another. It will be a situational majority. On the other hand, the Land Code voting showed that the Center and Right deputies are able to take a common stand on the main economic issues. Whether the new parliament will be a center of stability depends precisely on whether the parliament will manage to form a compromise-based majority. Otherwise, Verkhovna Rada will become a source of problems, as so often in the past.
