UKRAINE, USED TO PARLIAMENTARISM, VOTED FOR DEMOCRACY
By Iryna Pohorelova, Political Chronicles, special for The Day
The first parliamentary election under the new Constitution has taken place. The most legitimate branch of state power, the Ukrainian Parliament, has been elected. The high percentage of people, who participated in voting secured this legitimization and which may also appear the most serious obstacle to faking the results. The possibility of announcing the voting results invalid is close to zero despite numerous violations that took place, during the races and not so much on March 29. The possible juggling with the parties’ rosters in the future Parliament will not be able to influence the situation very much.
The first election to Verkhovna Rada refutes the rumors of a politically immature society by the high statistics of participation. According to observers, the indisputable success of Leftist parties is the obvious result of rejecting the policy of the current executive by Ukrainian society. However, Leftists’ victory in the fight for “party mandates” secured them neither a simple nor Constitutional majority in Parliament. In other words the “Constitutional upheaval” Kuchma has been threatening Ukraine with is unlikely to take place. Parliament influence upon the government and economic policy of Ukraine will depend on who will constitute the Parliament’s center. Experience of the outgoing thirteenth Verkhovna Rada shows that only the constant orientation of the Right Centrists to the myth of Presidential power and wrangling between Parliament and the Presidential Administration could block the work of Verkhovna Rada.
Obviously, the new Parliament will retain the problem of Right Centrists, and only Central Election Committee along with law enforcement and the courts will be able to solve it. The CEC should block the city mayors, plants’ directors, state officials, or President’s Administration’s executives from becoming People’s Deputies. By doing so, CEC will justify its own creation and will also make life easier for law enforcement and the courts. Should it fail to do so, it will foster “creeping” upheaval, which was postponed due to the increased attention of the world public to the elections in Ukraine. By assisting it (unlike the Constitutional Court which simply avoided the issue), CEC would apparently become its first victim. But the high legitimization level of elections will save CEC from that. If all the Right Centrists, who received only one mandate each, will work in Parliament independently, unlike their predecessors, we will no longer hear of Ukrainian lawmakers voting using someone else’s cards; we will see the extremist Leftist stand get less extreme and “Ukrainian oligarchs” reach understanding in Parliament, rather than in the President’s waiting room.
The new Parliament is unlikely to pass the pre-election slogan on canceling Deputies’ immunity. Like any change to the Constitution, this question cannot be solved without a Constitutional majority of a certain party, and if the President keeps on pressuring, this might lead to only one thing - deputies’ immunity will be canceled along with the President’s own. If it goes that far, Leonid Kuchma will be the first to forget about it.
Pustovoitenko’s government, which decided against submitting their program to the old Parliament, will have to make economic miracles come true or ... join Communist Party of Ukraine in the next two months. Anyway, the election campaign has shown that the party of power is able to create perfect examples of post-totalitarian Soviet populism.
We may congratulate the President with the new, this time open, representative in Parliament, the Progressive Socialistic Party. However, even the People’s Democratic Party is unlikely to lobby Kuchma’s interests in coalition with them, but the President no longer has the problem of party orientation (his political mentality has gone full circle since 1994), which is good: the President should lead the establishment out of the shadows.
There are also negative points: the wages and pensions workers and pensioners received this month might be their last pay this year. Sponsors of the election race, who have already laundered much money, will try to get their reward. But such is our life.
This is a paradox, but those who have been telling us tales lost the elections along with those who believe that Ukrainians do not care about democracy. The country will be much better off if the political literacy tests stop now. Moreover, the parliamentary election experience should be conducted taken into account in working on the presidential scenario.
Photo by Volodymyr Rasner, The Day:
Try to be accurate with such a system
