Nobody Knows

The latest elections have left Ukraine with a situation that becomes more curious by the day. The Hamlet of Ukrainian politics, Viktor Yushchenko, lacks a majority and seems unable to say with whom he will deal, only with whom he will not, nor does he seem to have much of a coherent articulated idea of what he is for. The party of power that has had the wherewithal to secure as many loose deputies as possible to its banner, is trying to put something together, but the numbers have not added up so far. Meanwhile, the head of a government in theory responsible to the parliament says that the government must never be an object of bargaining in the parliament, which brought his predecessor down and could in theory do the same with him. As a political analyst, I try to figure it all out and fail dismally.

I am not a citizen of this country, but those who are have a right to know what to expect from those they voted for or against. What are the policy differences between the parties? If somebody wants to be prime minister, let him tell people how he intends to do things differently from what the current one has been doing. The problem is not whether one politician or another is better or worse but in the entire cult of opacity surrounding what is actually going on, a cult devilishly difficult to combat. This problem, like almost all in the former Soviet Union, is inherited from the Soviet past. It is that the system was one whose demands could not be met without breaking the system’s own rules, and this meant that talking openly about what was actually going on became almost suicidal. Until this changes, people will have no opportunity to make an informed choice about real policy alternatives, and democracy even in its admittedly imperfect Western sense will remain impossible. Here the issue ceases to be one of personalities and becomes one of ingrained habits, habits that the outside world will find it almost impossible to understand. Those habits will not be changed overnight, only through a series of tentative steps to make it possible to make things more transparent, more honest, and to give the people themselves a sense of the real policy choices they face. Only then will we be able to talk about Ukraine moving toward Europe. In order to become European, Ukraine will have to first unlearn the lessons of Lenin, who just had a birthday, and relearn all that was drummed out of it for seven decades. This will be neither an easy nor brief process, but there is no other alternative if in a decade Ukraine is to even hope to get where, say, Poland is today, not to speak of where Poland is likely to be then.