You're reading: Party of Regions’ congress shows gap between words, actions

 In a way, the Party of Regions congress on July 30 resembled lemmings dutifully walking towards the cliff. The congress votes unanimously on candidates to be put forth to voters for the Oct. 28 parliamentary election – even though the delegates didn’t know who they were voting for.

This wasn’t
even Soviet, since in the old days all congress delegates knew beforehand the
names of the candidates they had to support.

 After the
vote, the party announced top
five people
on the list.
To get the rest, journalists had to persuade Party of Regions members who had
the list to let them take pictures of it. That’s how at least the top 150 names
of the party’s candidates came to be known.

 The voting process
was only a part of the drama at the July 30 congress.

 Rinat
Akhmetov
, one of the
biggest backers of President Viktor Yanukovych and Ukraine’s richest billionaire,
followed his earlier promise not to run for parliament again. Akhmetov is
currently a lawmaker in the ruling Regions Party faction in the 450-seat
parliament.

 The list,
however, included a number of his close allies, including Deputy Prime Minister
and Minister for Infrastructure Borys Kolesnikov, who – like Akhmetov – skipped
the congress.

 President
Viktor Yanukovych’s younger son
, Viktor Jr., who does not frequent the parliament where he serves as a
deputy, is nevertheless running for parliament again. He’s number 18 on the
Party of Regions’ list.

 His
presence on the list is a living reminder of the gap between the words and
actions of the current government. Yanukovych, Jr. will run for parliament with
an undistinguished legislative record, aside from strong support for tough ban
on smoking advertisements. And yet his father, the president, is calling on
parliament to stop being a “closed members club.”

 “It mostly
depends on us whether the parliament, as a closed elite club, will turn into a
representative legislative organ that stands guard over of human rights,
national sovereignty and independence of Ukraine. I think the Party of Regions is ready to an honest conversation with its citizens,” President Yanukovych said during his opening
speech.

 As a
president, he has to be non-partisan, but he remains the Honorary President of
the Party of Regions.

 Read more
about theParty of Regions list of candidates here.

 The
congress, which took place in a huge exhibition hall, was filled with several
hundred delegates and up to 6,000 guests from all over the country and from
abroad, including Vladimir Putin’s United Russia and the Communist Party of
China.

 Attendees
had to go through tight airport-style security, complete with metal detectors.
They were asked to hand over bottles of water, which people fetched to keep the
temperature under control in the poorly conditioned hall.

 Journalists
had no access to the main hall, and had to stick to the separate zone, where
the congress was broadcast on a big screen.

 In his
opening speech, Yanukovych praised his own presidency and the country’s
performance, but noted that the country is still far behind on economic
transparency.

 “According to
various estimates, the level of shadow Ukrainian economy is over 30 percent of GDP [gross domestic product],” he acknowledged.

 Prime
Minister Mykola Azarov predictably put the blame on his predecessors, namely
the government of the imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose
party held a congress earlier on the same day.

 When the
speeches were over, the delegates had to vote for the list of their candidates
who will represent the Party of Regions in the next parliament in case of
victory. Current polls give them about 20 percent of support, the second
largest number after the opposition.

 Asked
whether it was true that the delegates had no idea who they voted for, deputy
Volodymyr Rybak, a top party functionary, sitting next to Yanukovych and Azarov
on the panel, told the Kyiv Post that prior to the congress the party “carried
out the political council of the heads of party organizations, discussing all
the lists, then they worked with their delegates.”

 “It is our
right to do like we did, so we announced just top five [candidates],” he added.

 Sergiy
Tigipko, one of the few insiders who was frequently asked by others about the
goings-on with the list, commented on it during his brief conference on
Facebook on July 31.

 “If
yesterday the list [of candidates] was not distributed to all the delegates, it
is very bad,” he said. Indeed.

 Kyiv
Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at
[email protected]. Denis Rafalsky can be reached at [email protected]