Fair Election?

This week's presidential election will be by far the most decisive in the history of Ukraine as a newly independent state. The question is not whether they will be fair, for they are already grossly unfair, tainted by the unprecedented pressure brought on the media which intensifies by the day. It functions through constant “verifications” in the form tax audits, fire inspections, and checking every possible document (in a country with such a labyrinth of red tape that it is virtually impossible to have all one's documents in order) of unruly media outlets and anyone so incautious as to back them. The idea is that investors tire of losing money and sell their holdings or bring in management more congenial to the President. As we see from the case of STB, it works. So much for freedom of the press.

As pointed out elsewhere in this issue, there is a complete information blackout on the incumbent's main rivals, and even the paid spots shown are so short as to be incapable of saying anything. Natalia Vitrenko was able to get across the most content, one phrase, “I know how to save Ukraine,” followed by her name.

God save Ukraine from that sort of salvation. One dreads to think how this lady, who with her ever-present male comrade beat national democratic People's Deputy Pavlo Movchan to a pulp and put him in the hospital, plans to save it. This is perhaps why the Presidential Administration has been supporting her candidacy, to give President Kuchma an opponent he might actually beat.

However, as one member of the local diplomatic corpus recently pointed out to me, “They could be mistaken. Like Von Pappen was wrong about Hitler. Don't they have any sense of history?” Unfortunately, they don't.

The current regime has put this country on the fast track to the Third World. Unless there is a fundamental rethinking of the role of the state and it is scaled back to the point where it ceases to strangle private economic activity, this country will never get out of its crisis. This is not a matter of values but of basic realities. Everyone wants social justice, but in order to redistribute resources in the interests of social justice, there first has to be something to redistribute. The system that has grown up under this regime has so sucked the country dry that there really is not anything to redistribute, nor will there be until that system undergoes fundamental and structural change.

In watching this campaign one thinks of the old Frank Capra film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , in which one simple man has to take on the full force of corruption and graft. Being a prewar American film, good triumphed over evil, despite the impossible odds, of course. In the real world, however, one can only hope against hope.