Parliamentary By-Elections: Fatherland and Communist Party in the Ring

Several parties are going to go all out in the Verkhovna Rada by-elections scheduled for June 25. The Communists, NDP, and Fatherland have already said they will nominate candidates in all or almost all the ten winner take all constituencies. Fatherland leader Yuliya Tymoshenko especially stressed in an Interfax interview that her party would join forces with no one and conduct an independent election campaign.

Undoubtedly, the by-elections are so much in focus not only because every parliamentary vote today is worth its weight in gold. People’s Deputy and deputy leader of the Communist Party (KPU) fraction, Hryhory Ponomarenko, explained his party’s stand to The Day’s Natalia TROFYMOVA: “Even if the Communists win in all the constituencies, we will still not be able to turn the situation around. Thus we see the propaganda of our ideas as the chief aim of our participation in the by-elections.”

Indeed, neither the opposition nor the parliamentary majority will radically solve the problem of their political clout even if all new ten fighters join precisely their ranks. Then what are the reasons why the parties are getting involved in a big- time and expensive campaign?

What is in the foreground is not only the propaganda of a certain ideology (only the Left can possibly take on a task like this) but also a different applicable argument: the flexing of political muscle. People’s Deputy and Fatherland faction member Artur Bilous, is certain that a political party with adequate financial and political resources acts logically, nominating the maximum number of by- election candidates. In addition to everything else, “this is sort of a competition with not only the Left but also, above all, with parliamentary majority partners who are soon going to become or are already becoming our political rivals. The victory of even two or three candidates will be significant and boost morale for the big election races,” he told The Day.

Speaking of the political context in which the by-elections will be held, political scientist Volodymyr Polokhalo notes that in practice the by-elections will not tip the existing balance of forces both in Parliament and in the political regime as a whole. Rather, they should be viewed as the continuation of a certain ongoing competition between political elites. “Competition has not vanished in the new political reality, when the majority emerged; in fact, the factions did not reorganize their interests together, nor did they strike a deal about compromises. Nothing of the sort. For this reason, our present commonwealth of elites is not enduring but purely situational,” the pundit told The Day. A few factions dominate within this commonwealth not because the ideology they represent dominates in society: this domination is due to the power of the financial, informational, and material resources command by a financial and political group whose interests a faction represents in Parliament.

“Ukraine has failed to form a normal party system capable of expressing different political interests and perform the functions of an intermediary between society and the state,” Polokhalo says. “But if there has been no success in building a civil society, the electorate have, of course, the right to choose, but they cannot influence the factions which have formed this situational commonwealth.

“Ukraine has formed a hybrid political regime which comprises both democratic and autocratic elements and is accompanied by a crisis of its parliamentary system. Today, Parliament is relegating itself unawares to the fringe of political development, thus increasing the power of the President, while the Cabinet of Ministers is turning into a purely technical body.

“The crisis of the parliamentary system reduces the importance of not only the by-elections but elections in general. There is even something tragicomic in the by- elections to a Parliament that is rapidly losing its political heft. So June 25 could become either an exercise in flexing muscles or an attempt by some factions to cease to be political outsiders, but that’s all. For the by-elections themselves cannot upset the existing balance of forces.”