Politicians, open up your wallets.It turns out that voting is not considered a sacred civic obligation by all of Ukraine’s votes.
A
June poll by GfK Ukraine shows that 6.2 percent of Ukrainians are
willing to vote for candidates who offer them money or presents.
Such
attitudes could have a significant effect on the composition of the
new parliament, whose 450 members will be elected anew on Oct. 28
in a vote that is expected to be one by a percentage point or two.
Polls show that the nation’s political opposition has a chance of
winning a majority in the nation’s legislature, in turn breaking
President Viktor Yanukovych’s monopoly grip on power.
Hlib
Vyshlinsky, deputy director of GkK Ukraine, thinks the real number of
Ukrainians who could “sell’ their votes in such a high-stakes
contest may be higher.
“There
is a notion of a socially acceptable answer,” Vyshlinsky said.
“Saying that you will sell your vote is not a socially acceptable
answer, so the likelihood is that there are more of them in real
life.”
Vyshlinsky
said the category of people most likely to sell their votes are those
with low incomes, either very young or old and not socially active.
The beneficiaries are likely to be candidates from the
pro-presidential ruling party. “They are most likely to be Party of
Regions voters,” Vyshlinsky said.
Indeed,
the candidates for parliament seem to know this already.
In
the past months, there have been several reports in the media
highlighting politicians’ doling out presents that usually contain
staples like buckwheat, butter, pasta and sugar. Such gifts are
usually disguised as presents for holidays like Women’s Day or
Victory Day, and have a card with a message from the sender. Some 5.6
percent of GfK Ukraine’s respondents said that they have been offered
such presents.
Party
of Regions deputies Dmytro Svyatash, Iryna Berezhna and Valeriy
Pysarenko have handed out such presents. So has former top Kyiv city
official Oles Dovhiy, who plans to run as an independent in a
single-mandate constituency in Kyiv.
The
good news is that a majority
of Ukrainians – about 52 percent – will not change their minds
for such a pittance, according to the poll, while another 30 percent
said they’re prepared to take a bribe, without promising anything.
And,
of course, there is no guarantee that those who receive gifts will
vote for the giving candidate – unless there is a payment
afterwards in exchange for proof that a ballot was cast the right
way.
Oleksandr
Chernenko,
head of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine election watchdog, said
that bribes will be a major problem in the coming election.
Nonetheless,
bribes might affect the decisions of the 35 percent of voters who are
still undecided, according to the same representative poll of 1,000
people.
Kyiv
Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached
at [email protected].
