A large group of liberal politicians, activists, and former top officials critical of the country’s current leadership are finally making an attempt to bring a reform-minded, liberal, democratic government to power.
But they aren’t forming just one new political party. They’re forming two. And the split hasn’t been clean.
Leading liberals, like Sergii Leshchenko, Mustafa Nayyem, Viktor Chumak, Vitaliy Kasko and many others had long been expected to unite into a new party. But the group has now split in two over disagreements about leadership. Some from the liberal camp said they wanted to limit the influence of Odesa governor and ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili on the new party. The rest, on the contrary, wanted to center the new force around him.
Jumping the gun
After Saakashvili, his associates, and like-minded politicians and officials toured Ukraine with their Anti-Corruption Forums early in the year, no one doubted that a new party was in the making.
It was at these forums that Saakashvili, a former classmate of President Petro Poroshenko, who was recruited by the head of state in 2015 to take the helm of the turbulent Odesa Oblast, began to speak critically of his patron’s policies.
Talk of a new party was rife in the ensuing months. It rose in volume in early spring, as the parliament coalition broke up and the previous government teetered and fell, threatening an early election. But a political crisis has since been staved off, and the coalition in parliament is saved – at least for the moment.
Nevertheless, the announcement of the creation of a new party was widely expected at meeting of participants in Saakashvili’s forums and like-minded activists scheduled for June 29.
But a day earlier around a dozen members of the liberal movement held a separate meeting, excluding supposed allies like Leshchenko and Nayyem, and announced they were starting a party without them.
The rest of the liberal camp was taken by surprise.
“They did it to outpace us,” Leshchenko said. “They knew about our meeting and met a day earlier, on purpose.”
The Saakashvili factor
According to Leshchenko, the reason for the split is that he and several of his supporters didn’t want the new party to be centered around one leader — Saakashvili.
“Our side didn’t want Saakashvili to be able to take control,” Leshchenko said. “I don’t know how Chumak will contain him now.”
Chumak, one of the founders of the party that announced its creation on June 28, says that Saakashvili was the one who had inspired it.
“This whole thing wouldn’t be happening without Saakashvili,” Chumak said. “He will be supporting us.”
Saakashvili, however, can’t take an active role in the new party, as his newly-acquired Ukrainian citizenship doesn’t give him the right to run for parliament for another four years.
Odesa Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili speaks at an Anti-Corruption Forum on Dec. 23 in Kyiv. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Some argue that the ambitious Georgian will instead use the new party to win himself the highest position that a new citizen can take – prime minister.
And that could well be popular with voters: Political consultant Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the Penta political research firm, says that the promise of Saakashvili as prime minister is the trump card of the new party.
“Of course they will campaign on it,” Fesenko said. “It’s the strategy that was successfully used by the People’s Front and Arseniy Yatsenyuk in 2014, and before that by Yulia Tymoshenko. They need Saakashvili.”
According to Chumak, the split was also driven by differing views on the future party’s ideology.
“They want to be liberals, while we want to find balance between liberalism and socialism,” Chumak said. “In a country so poor, pure liberalism will never win. We want to engage a broader audience.”
Paying for change
The “Saakashvili party” will be registered by October, according to Chumak. Among its founders are politicians and ex-officials that have run afoul of the current leadership of the country.
Chumak and Yehor Firsov were both lawmakers with the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction in parliament, but were expelled from parliament for criticizing the bloc. Kasko and Davit Sakvarelidze were deputies of the prosecutor general and investigated corruption in the prosecutor’s office. Both were fired, and became the subjects of criminal investigations themselves.
Another member, Denys Brodskiy, is a well-known HR professional who in 2014 agreed to lead the reform in the State Employment Agency, but quit a month later after a quarrel with then Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Chumak said that the new party would be funded by donations from “normal, non-oligarch businesses.” He said that before the party was announced – and before the split – he had already had some 30 meetings with business owners who want to support the party.
“We need to form a pool of donors who will pay for change — not for places on a party list,” Chumak said, referring to the common practice of Ukrainian businessmen buying their way onto party lists, and thus into parliament, so as to enjoy political influence and immunity from prosecution.
Window for cooperation
Chumak also said that he still expects the other group of liberals to join the new party.
But Leshchenko was surprised to hear that.
“I don’t understand (why Chumak is saying that) after he didn’t invite us to the meeting where they were deciding to start a party,” he said.
So instead of giving up their positions and joining the “Saakashvili party,” the excluded activists are forming one of their own.
Over a dozen of them are joining forces with Democratic Alliance, a grassroots Christian democratic party led by Vasyl Gatsko. Democratic Alliance was registered in September 2011, but has only ever won two seats – on the Kyiv City Council in 2014.
With the help of the activists that didn’t fit into Saakashvili’s new force, Gatsko will rebrand and relaunch Democratic Alliance as a “new” party of right-wing liberals.
The core of the rebranded party includes lawmakers Leshchenko, Nayyem, Svitlana Zalishchuk, Victoria Ptashnyk, and an advisor to the ecology minister, Svitlana Kolomiyets. Many of them were members of an unofficial parliamentary alliance of progressive lawmakers called the EuroOptimists.
On June 29, the group invited several dozen potential members of the party to a closed meeting in Kyiv. Since it will be based on Democratic Alliance, their “new” party will not have undergo the registration process, unlike Chumak’s new party.
Then- Ukrainian prosecutors Davit Sakvarelidze (L) and Vitaly Kasko at a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada’s anti-corruption committee on July 16. (Volodymyr Petrov)
The first party convention will take place on July 9.
But it may be a while before the new parties see the verdict of the voters, as the next scheduled election isn’t for three years. However, with a flimsy coalition ruling in parliament, there is still an outside chance of an early election.
In an interview with Ukrainian television’s 112 channel earlier in June, Leshchenko said that a right-wing liberal party could win 10 percent of the vote in a parliamentary election – double the 5 percent minimum that a party needs to win seats in the Verkhovna Rada. Gatsko is even more optimistic: He thinks it could come first.
“There’s no point in doing it if we’re not doing it to win,” Gatsko said.
At the same time, both new parties say there is scope for future cooperation with each other.
“Our differences are in our methods, not our goals,” Nayyem wrote in a post on Facebook on June 29.
“We have an open window for consultations,” Chumak said in an interview published by Ukrainian television’s 24 Channel on June 30.
