Each parliamentary election has its own fashion. Singers and actors used to be the must-have accessories on party lists because of their fame with voters. The Oct. 26 snap parliamentary election will be marked by a new trend in voter bait: journalists, soldiers and EuroMaidan Revolution activists as candidates.
Although political analysts remain skeptical that this new blood will bring a better quality of lawmaking, these off-beat candidates hope to bring their strengths into the parliamentary mix and improve the fight against corruption and make other improvements in the nation.
The corruption fight will be high on the agenda of Serhiy Leshchenko, the 34-year-old deputy chief editor of Ukrainska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s most influential news organizations. Leshchenko is running as number 19 on the party list of President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc.
As a part of the transparency drive, he will push for public financing of political parties in a bid to blunt the bankrolling by billionaire oligarchs with vested political and business interests to protect. He struggles, however, to explain which of the more than 200 parties in Ukraine will be eligible for this financing.
Leshchenko said the political system needs to be changed to allow parliamentarians to work in government and run businesses at the same time. Lawmakers would also have to officially declare all their extra-parliamentary interests.
If elected, some want to keep pushing the same initiatives as they did in the non-profit sector.
Vitaliy Shabunin, 29, a former head of the board at the Anti-Corruption Action Center, is number five on the Civic Position party list headed by former Defense Minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko. If elected, Shabunin wants to oversee the creation of a National Anti-corruption Agency. He also suggests introducing criminal responsibility for illegal wealth acquisition.
Altogether, dozen of activists and journalists who have landed on party lists, including Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, Andriy Sadovyi’s Samopomich, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front, who also has a number of war heroes on his team.
Oleksiy Haran, a political science professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, welcomes the entry of journalists and public activists but also warns of the risk that the system will change them instead of the other way around.
Some of the journalists, including Ukrainian investigative journalist Mustafa Nayyem, 33, want to create inter-factional groups in parliament. Nayyem is running 20th on Poroshenko’s party list.
Viatliy Bala, director of Situations Modeling Agency, is skeptical about journalists and activists running for parliament.
“Being a politician is a profession and you have to study it,” Bala said. “The only thing that makes me optimistic is the majority voting system and I hope that people will vote not for those who are good at singing or writing but for those who have proven their ability to act.”
Old habits also remain.
Oleg Lyashko and his Radical Party are betting on Zlata Ognevich, a singer who represented Ukraine in the Eurovison song contest in 2013. She is number four on his list. The 28-year old singer agreed to sing in Mariupol when the Azov Sea port city was under threat of invasion by the Russian army. Ognevich has also toured with other singers to raise money for the army.
Soldiers are also running for office.
Yuliy Mamchur, 43, a former commander of the 204th tactical aviation brigade, was based in Crimea in February and moved to Mykolayiv in March after the Russian takeover of the peninsula. Mamchur became famous when he led his men to defend an airport despite being armed with nothing but flags of the nation and his brigade. Russian invaders watched in awe as the Ukrainian soldiers marched against them on the runway.
Mamchur now runs on Poroshenko’s party list. While the decision was hard for him, Mamchur says “everybody should be in the parliament, including military men.”
Others disagree.
“It’s better to use people for their intended purpose: To teach them modern techniques and provide them with modern arms while there is a pause” in fighting, said Voldymyr Fesenko, director at Penta center for political studies.
Other interesting contenders have surfaced. One is Kyiv businessman Vyacheslav Kostyantynovsky. The 53-year-old millionaire and his brother run several restaurants. He joined the war front in Luhansk two months ago. Since then, he and his friends have donated more than $500,000 to help the nation’s defenders.
Kostyantynovsky wants to make financing of the Ukrainian army more transparent and improve salaries and medical care for servicemen. “I hope I can realize myself in politics as I did that in business,” Kostyantynovsky said. He runs in a single-member district in Kyiv with the People’s Front party of Yatsenyuk, the prime minister.
A poll conducted by the Kyiv Institute of Sociology in September showed that more than 21 percent of Ukrainians plan to vote for the president’s party, while Lyashko’s and Hrytsenko’s party have 7.6 and 5.6 percent support respectively, with Yatsenyuk’s party trailing with just 3.7 percent support. The electoral threshold stands at five percent at the moment. Half of the parliament is filled through single-mandate districts, the other half through party lists.
Kyiv Post staff writer Anastasia Forina can be reached at [email protected]
