Yesterday, Ukranians voted in their parliamentary elections. We tend to ignore those in America, as big as we are for the top-dog, winner-take-all presidential election.
What no one outside of Ukraine seems to realize (nor, it seems a lot of people in Ukraine), is that yesterday was the most important vote since the creation of an independent Ukraine.
I used to think Ukraine was on the right track, that 25 years from now I could come back and see an entirely different place: a full-fledged transparent democracy, an attack-dog fourth estate of journalism and a first-world economy and infrastructure.
Instead, politically and economically, it’s been backsliding. And yesterday’s vote, far more than the results of the Orange Revolution, will determine the direction of the future.
The Orange Revoution could have been a watershed moment, but it failed.
Let me explain. After the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko had a huge popular mandate and it seemed he could have done anything.
What he did was appoint fiery, populist Yulia Tymoshenko as Prime Minister and chocolate-magnate Petro Poroshenko as the Head of the National Security and Defense Council and then went off on a world tour of awards and photo-ops. The thing was, Poroshenko wanted to be Prime Minister.
Two factions in the government formed around these two and Tymoshenko went on to make a lot of mistakes. She scared off international investors by starting to reprivitize businesses sold off to cronies under former president Kuchma (although, admittedly, the resale prices turned out to be several hundred times what they were originally sold for), GDP growth dropped from 12% to 4%, and inflation brought up the prices of food and gasoline. Harkening back to communist days, Tymoshenko put a price cap on gasoline, which caused shortages before the cap was lifted and I watched my marshrutka ride to Kyiv jump from 12 hrivna to 17.
The rising prices alone started people grumbling.
Some good was being done, because you can’t change everything in a day: a lot of tax loopholes were closed and government revenue was increasing. Also, American trade sanctions against Ukraine were dropped and the west finally recognized Ukraine as having a market economy. But while things were going well with the west, Yushchenko was doing it at the expense of relations with Russia, something started by appointing Tymoshenko in the first place.
In Ukraine, the governmental infighting grew worse, as Poroshenko bypassed Tymoshenko repeatedly to get access to the president, and Tymoshenko started a sophisticated attack campaign against him.
In September of last year, it came to a head and Yushchenko decided to solve the infighting by firing his entire Cabinet of Ministers, including Prime Minister Tymoshenko. That’s right. He fired the whole executive branch.
In Tymoshenko’s place, Yushchenko appointed Yuri Yekanurov, a rather more laid back politician from the east. The problem was that Yushchenko couldn’t get Yekanurov appointed by parliament. So what did he do? He turned to Yanukovych-his rival during the Orange Revolution and the man he denounced as corrupt. Yanukovych agreed, but only if Yushchenko agreed to three things:
1) Amnesty to those who committed election related crimes in the 2004 campaign
2) Support for a bill to give immunity to local elected officials
3) A pledge not to attempt to change the constitutional reforms passed in December 2004.
Yushchenko agreed and Yekanurov was confirmed.
Let’s back up a step. Yushchenko, who was supported by millions in a peaceful political revolution aimed at stopping corruption, agreed to welcome. Not only was all the documented corruption of the election that sparked the Orange Revolution going to go unpunished, but the immunity already awarded to members of parliament (you heard that right: members of Ukranian parliament are protected from criminal prosecution) would now extend to locally elected officials. That means if you are in the mafia and get yourself elected mayor of some small Ukranian town, the law can never touch you. This is why, in yesterday’s election, the ballots were more than three feet long. Everyone is trying to get a local position, and, unlike at the national level where everything is now closely monitored for corruption, election corruption at the local level is still rampant.
This bill should obviously be struck down by the Supreme Court of Ukraine, but several seats on it are unfilled and the Parliament hasn’t convened a quorum to appoint new ones. So currently there is no judicial oversight on bills passed by parliament. And parliament is mostly controlled by Oligarchs and the mafia.
Although many Ukranians felt sold out by Yushchenko, most take corruption in stride. Poltava has been declared the most corrupt city in Ukraine. It’s mayor, who owns almost all the major businesses in the city, decided to run for parliament and won. He could not legally hold both positions, but didn’t want to give up his mayorship, so he told the city council not to convene while he is in parliament, meaning no vote can be cast to appoint a new mayor, meaning Poltava, a city of over a million, has no mayor while he is in parliament. I asked my friend Sasha what she thought about her hometown of Poltava being considered the must corrupt. She said that was untrue. I rattled off the above facts. “Yeah, but it’s not the most,” she said. “They’re all like that.”
And we haven’t even gotten to point three. During the revolution, in order to get a revote, Yushchenko agreed to “constitutional reforms” that would pass most of the president’s powers to the Prime Minister, and that the Prime Minister would be appointed by parliament, not by the President. This reform was started years prior by Kuchma, who could legally no longer be president, but wanted to retain powers by being appointed Prime Minister. Kuchma is effectively out of the game, but the one year window built into the agreement that would allow Yushchenko power when he took office is over. His Presidency is pretty much window dressing and to get his Prime Minister confirmed he had to agree not to challenge the very thing that stripped his power. He now only nominally controls the military (but the Orange Revolution proved that no one really knows who controls the military) and has an advisory role in government.
Being President in Ukraine no longer matters. What matters is being Prime Minister.
Theoretically, though, Yushchenko shouldn’t even be president. Parliament, after the natural gas fiasco with Russia, voted to dismiss his government, including him. What happened was that Russia, pissed at Ukraine, tripled its prices for natural gas. Yushchenko balked and Russia turned off the tap in one of its coldest winters in a century. Under European pressure Russia finally negotiated with Yushchenko, but what resulted is a shady deal where a company, whose owners are unknown because it’s registered in Switzerland, buys gas from Russia, mixes it with gas from Kazakhstan and resells it to Ukraine at a higher price, but still lower than the prices Russia demanded. Someone was making money while more than 50 people died due to the cold. Yushchenko refuses to say who the owners of the company are.
When Yushchenko got back from Kazakhstan to find out Parliament had dismissed him, he said the vote was unconstitutional and refused to recognize it. Currently, his government is still operating.
In Ukraine, there was a lot of talk that the country was going to collapse.
And now we get to why yesterday’s election was so important: due to the new laws put into place during the Orange Revolution compromise, whichever party or bloc has the most votes gets to appoint the Prime Minister and therefore creates the new government. The party does not need a majority, it simply needs to get the most votes. So a party that gets 9% of the vote while every other party receives 8% or less would be the ruling party and appoint the Prime Minister.
Considering that there are at least 11 major parties campaigning and a number of minor ones, it could be that the next leader of Ukraine will be appointed with single digit support of the people. Ironically, one of the main contenders is Yannokovich’s party, the Party of Regions. A little over a year ago, Yanokovich was considered evil incarnate, a representation of all the post-soviet corruption that ate at Ukraine like a cancer. Now, at least two of my Ukranian friends support him, reactionary votes, they say, to Yushchenko, who let them down. The rest of my friends are split between Yushchenko’s bloc and Tymoshenko’s bloc.
There really is no telling who is going to control Ukraine, but they’re counting the votes as I type this. Whoever wins is going to have a lot of power for the next four years, and never have to worry about being persecuted.
When I was here for the Orange Revolution, I thought I was here for a moment in history. Something that would be looked back upon and remembered as the turning point. Everyone else felt that way, too.
A little over a year later, though, it’s politics as usual.