Campaign Time

The world looks on at Ukraine’s coming elections to make sure they meet world standards, and as a local couch potato, I could not be more pleased with what I see. The Communists have a slick and rather persuasive advertisement, while their shorts are also quite good, and somebody — I have no idea who — is paying to put them on the air. The Greens and Yushchenko are out in force as is the vitriolic Natalia Vitrenko. The point is not who I like; in fact, I find it comforting that as a foreigner I lack the right to vote here. The point is that I do not see any information boycotts as I have seen in past campaigns. The polling firms, even if their results cannot by Ukrainian law be published within two weeks of the elections, are good enough to catch any wholesale rigging, and while some diddling might happen on the local level — it has happened often enough in my own America — it will probably not significantly affect the overall result. The politicians, of course, are busy promising more government goodies, simultaneously lower taxes, and other pie in the sky, but Western style representative self-government assumes that people are bright enough to separate the promissory wheat from the chaff. Whether that is true in the current context is something we will have to wait and see about. After all, it is for the citizens of Ukraine to decide where they want to steer this country. The point is that for once the authorities seem to be bending over backwards to show the world and their own citizens that this election will be free and fair. While I might be less than optimistic about the likely result, because I consider the society that will produce it somewhat less that healthy, I appreciate the effort. Ukraine has serious and deep-seated problems, but at least in this election campaign I see some effort to address them. Ukraine is clearly not Zimbabwe. It deserves the wider world’s attention and support for what seems to be shaping up as a job that will be as well done as can be expected under the circumstances.