Victims of the Process
January 29 marked the deadline of party rosters’ registration with the Central Election Committee (CEC) for the March parliamentary race, meaning that all documents submitted past that date will not be disqualified. A total of 23 political parties and 13 blocs submitted theirs on time. 14 rosters remained to be processed before the closing hour, including the blocs Yednist (Unity), Against All, and For Yushchenko, along with the parties New Generation of Ukraine, Women of Ukraine, For the Rehabilitation of the Seriously Ill, while the Rainbow: Green Ecologists bloc is presently renamed “Rainbow” and submitting the registration papers again.
On the final submission date, the CEC registered about as many rosters as it had on all previous days. Practically no team had crossed the finish line in its original form, including Winter Generation, losing its number three, Mykola Sytnyk, better known as popular 1+1 television host Mykola Veresen, who had to step down because the election law does not provide for candidates using pseudonyms more often than their actual names. Someone said that the man is the first pseudonym victim; publicity victim is perhaps more like it.
Registration was also denied Our Ukraine’s Oleksandr Slobodian, Les Taniuk, Yaroslav Kendzior, and Mykola Porovsky; NRU No. 2 (Heorhy Filipchuk) and No. 5 (Serhiy Koniev), but the heaviest losses were sustained by the Democratic Union and the Democratic Party of Ukraine (121 registered of 211 nominees). And it is difficult to accuse CEC of politicizing the registration process. To the trickiest of questions CEC Chairman Mykhailo Riabets calmly replied that it was their fault, not ours; some entered the wrong date of birth, others forgot to mention party membership, still others could not remember since when they had been living in Ukraine, and so on. After all, this is not the first election campaign, it was publicly announced that Riabets & Co. would have enough resources to process every single document in every single package. Those that did not believe it now know better.
Some of those refused might have had the time to make corrections and submit the package again.
All told, 2,765 candidates (2,129 male and 636 female) were registered in all territorial constituencies, compared to almost 4,000 entered in the party and bloc rosters; 1,160 will run in single seat ones. Mr. Riabets says 577 current roster candidates (20.8%) have vied in previous elections, and that 218 have been previously elected. CEC statistics show that the roster candidates include seven chairmen of district councils, seven heads of regional state administrations, six tax service officials, six are in charge of councils at various levels, six from the presidential administration (among them Volodymyr Lytvyn, of course), and five mayors. Among the candidates from the single seat constituencies 543 (46.8%) are party and bloc nominees, and 617 (53.2%) nominated themselves.
What cannot be described using dry statistics is the highstrung atmosphere of the current campaign, higher by far than in Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Nechui-Levytsky’s Kaidash Family, or Pushkin’s Gypsies (remember his “motley noisy crowd?”). Shakespeare might have envied some of the campaign episodes. In fact, Ukrainian campaigners could beat any fantasy film or soap opera with its doppelg К ngers, transformers, terminators, and so on.
Taras Chornovil, for example, said previously he would never shake hands with Andriy. Now he is ready to discuss reconciliation with his brother, seeing him as a victim rather than a guilty party. “I have no doubt that they will openly dump him in the nearest future, having used him the same way they did Ponamarchuk,” he says.
Oleksandr Hudyma, also from Our Ukraine, struggling to be immediately identifiable to his electorate (there are several other Hudymas among the candidates in Lviv oblast), proposes to return to the old method of the Zaporozhzhian Sich: “At the time the Cossacks would pull down their trousers in front of everybody to spot enemies in the camp,” he muses and explains, “so everybody could tell a real Cossack from a circumcised intruder...” Should such old traditions be revived, discussing ratings could assume a new, naturalistic dimension, although the sight could also prove unsavory for those of the electorate that have not read enough on Cossack history (and leave the candidate deputies dangling? – Ed.).
Much can be understood, of course. Except when, for example, NRU leader Yury Kostenko declared that Yuliya Tymoshenko’s car crash is a “sign that the electoral process is entering an extreme phase.” When will this “motley noisy crowd” finally beget a normal party system answering at least some of the universally accepted standards? How many election campaigns from now?
