You're reading: Ukrainian far-right surges in protest voting

A Ukrainian nationalist party accused of being anti-Semitic and hostile to homosexuals has made sharp gains in the country's parliamentary election, shaking up its political elite.

Svoboda, which draws on suspicion of Russia and of Ukraine‘s
large Russian-speaking minority, was winning about 9 percent of
the ballot in early returns on Monday, though many saw its surge
into parliament as more of a protest vote against the government
and main opposition rather than an endorsement of its policies.

Allied in Europe with France’s National Front, the British
National Party and Hungary’s Jobbik among others, Svoboda, whose
name means Freedom, may take some 33 of parliament’s 450 seats;
having never previously held more than one, it will now be one
of three main parties opposing President Viktor Yanukovich.

The movement, previously known by the Nazi-inflected title
the Social-National Party, denies hostility to Jews, though its
present leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, was once expelled from a
mainstream parliamentary grouping after denouncing a previous
Ukrainian government as a “mafia of Russians and Yids”.

A 43-year-old urogenital surgeon, Tyahnybok hails from Lviv,
the western heartland of Ukrainian nationalism during Soviet
times and a stronghold today of opposition to the influence of
Russian-speaking easterners – like President Yanukovich.

The rise of his party, which has criticised campaigns for
gay rights and honours nationalist partisans who allied with
Hitler’s forces against the Red Army in World War Two, was
apparently propelled by last-minute decisions among some voters.

“Svoboda was the biggest surprise,” said political analyst
Volodymyr Fesenko, noting that opinion polls taken as late as
last week had forecast it might not secure the five percent of
the national vote required to be represented in parliament.

“Many people decided to vote for Svoboda in the last few
days,” Fesenko said. “It was protest voting, not a vote for
Ukrainian nationalism.”

That seemed to be borne out by some of those who voted.

Dmytro Yakovenko, a 28-year-old journalist, said he opted
for Svoboda out of frustration with the ruling Party of the
Regions and its communist allies: “I wanted to swing the vote
away from the communists and the Regions,” he said in Kiev.

Yanukovich’s party is nonetheless set fair to retain power.

Iryna Sorokun, 67, a pensioner, said of Svoboda: “They seem
to be decent people and they have never been in parliament or
government, so I thought I should give them a chance.”

Svoboda, which follows other right-wing populist parties in
making gains in Europe during the financial and economic crisis,
also benefited from the Regions’ efforts this year to enact a
law bolstering the official status of the Russian language.

UNEASY OPPOSITION ALLIANCE

Svoboda’s agenda includes limiting the number of government
ministers who are not “ethnic Ukrainians” – a term that might
affect notably ethnic Russians, who account for a sixth of the
population, as well as Tatars, Jews and other small minorities.

One Svoboda activist famously campaigned successfully to
have a bus driver in Lviv dismissed from his job after he
refused to stop playing Russian-language songs on his route.

The party wants to ban abortion and, while Tyahnybok has
been quoted as saying sexual orientation is “everyone’s personal
business”, Svoboda has made clear it opposes gay rights and has
demanded a ban on the “propaganda of sexual perversions”.

The party leader denies it has ever been anti-Semitic. But
it has held rallies calling for limits on Jewish pilgrimages to
the grave of an 18th-century Hassidic rabbi in the city of Uman.

Some other opponents of Yanukovich have kept their distance:
“It is hard to agree with some things that smell like the far
right,” said Vitaly Klitschko, a heavyweight boxing champion who
leads the liberal party UDAR. “We won’t support extremism.”

However, the main united opposition bloc which includes the
Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party of Yanukovich’s jailed
adversary Yulia Tymoshenko, struck an alliance with Svoboda
before the election to cooperate in parliament after the vote.