You're reading: Well-financed Party of Regions stays on top, despite internal divisions

The Party of Regions is in the driver’s seat, leading all polls in the Oct. 28 parliamentary election. But that doesn’t mean the pro-presidential ruling party is just one big happy family.

Internal conflicts and frictions have become more visible
than ever, with some confrontations among various groupings and powerful
individuals bursting into public view. Some oligarchs, despite their habitual
ritualistic dancing with the Regions, are becoming more independent, and appear
to be leaving the Regions’ orbit.

Oleksiy
Haran, political analyst at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, says that friction over the
recent attempt to criminalize libel was an example of how conflicts in the party
spill out. He said the initiative, which caused a massive public uproar, was likely
an attempt by one of the groupings to set up a competing clan.

There is plenty of competition on the local level, too.
Volodymyr Fesenko, another political expert, says different single-mandate
district candidates were offered support in the same constituency by different
power brokers in the Party of Regions, causing many bad feelings.



Valeriy Konovalyuk

Valeriy Konovalyuk, one of
the prominent members of the Party of Regions, is now campaigning in
constituency 60 in Donetsk Oblast. Despite being a party member, he’s running as an independent candidate
and is competing with Oleksandr Ryzhenkov, a director of a local steel mill,
who is heavily promoted by the party.

Rivalry in the party is the
cause of this competition. “What happened to me is a usual working
relationship,” Konovalyuk says with caution, which is typical for people who
compete with the Regions but do not want to burn bridges. Later, on Oct. 12, Konovaliuk withdrew his candidature from the elections.

Viktor Pinchuk, one of
Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, is another example of both rivalry with the
Regions, and caution. After playing along with the Regions for years, he has now
nominated his flagship pipe plant’s top manager to run against a powerful Party
of Regions candidate in a single-mandate district in Dnipropetrovsk. Pinchuk
himself has been a deputy from that constituency twice.

He is now calling for his former voters to support his
candidate in the single-mandate, first-past-the-post race, yet vote for the
Party of Regions in the proportional vote, which fills half the parliament. His TV channels are also presenting more balanced election
coverage than UT-1, Inter and 1+1 TV channel, according to monitoring by Equal
Opportunities watchdog.

The process
of composing the party list for the Regions also showed the rise of some
groups, while others got sidelined.

Read more
about the Party of Regions list of candidates here.

Olena
Bondarenko one of the party’s prominent speakers and number 47 on the list,
says the list was composed by Andriy Kliuyev, secretary of the National
Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, who runs the election headquarters,
based on consultations with President Viktor Yanukovych.

She says
candidates are chosen on the basis of their usefulness for the party in
parliament. The core team, she says, includes lawyers and potential authors of
legislation. Then, there are “the talking heads” able to present the party’s
point of view in the Rada and the media.

Party
sponsors are another category. “People who have been party’s financiers for a
long time, who have allowed it to live, exist and support a full-time staff,”
she explains.

Then, there
are people who “can be useful in case of destructive actions of the
opposition,” she says.

The fact that
Klyuev was in charge of composing the list has triggered lots of speculation
about who is in favor and who is out of favor.

Few people are on the party list who are tied to presidential
chief of staff Serhiy Lyovochkin and First Deputy Prime Minister Valeriy
Khoroshkovskiy. This is interpreted as a weakening of this group, while “The
Family”
– loyalists close to Yanukovych – gains more
power.  The president’s older son, Oleksandr Yanukovych and his friend,
National Bank governor Serhiy Arbuzov, are considered to be the leaders of
“The Family.”

Taras
Berezovets, a political consultant, estimated
that the Party of Regions has spent $200 million on its campaign. The
campaign is clearly well-organized and visible in all regions. Journalists from
Ukrainska Pravda news website published campaign plans, complete with slogans
and breakdown of actions, long before its official start in July.

Volodymyr
Rybak, a prominent party member and No. 10 on the proportional ticket, said the
party has no money troubles. “We have enough wealthy people. So there are no
problems with financing the party,”  Rybak told the Kyiv Post.

The party’s
private finances appear to be bolstered also by government spending – or at
least promises of public spending.

Oleksiy
Azarov, the 41-year-old son of Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, is
running for parliament in a single-mandate district in eastern Ukraine,
promised to solve the longstanding regional water supply problem by getting a
government subsidy for it.

This is far
from an isolated case.

The Party
of Regions advertising billboards are portraying budget-sponsored projects,
such as construction of airports and a successful Euro 2012 tournament last
summer, as the party’s achievements. Prime Minister Mykola Azarov had said in
June that infrastructural projects alone for Euro 2012 cost Ukraine Hr 40
billion.

The Regions
has also been doling budget cash by raising pensions and salaries to public
employers several times over the past year. The tactic has clearly worked in
favor of the party’s popularity: despite the fact that close to half of
Ukrainians are saying they are not satisfied with the current political
situation, the Regions are leading in polls with 23.5 percent of support,
according to the latest poll by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

Experts say the Regions have also partially managed to
mobilize Russian-speaking voters in the east and south through the adoption of a
law that allows gives Russian regional language status on par
with Ukrainian. The Regions hope to get 85-87 parliament seats through the
proportional system, and augment them with a whopping
130 single-mandate candidates. Fesenko says they have a decent
chance to achieve this goal.

One reason why they could achieve this goal is the fact that local
election bodies are heavily dominated by representatives of the Regions party.
They are also ruthless campaigners. OPORA election watchdog called the Regions
Party the biggest violator of campaign rules.

Rybak says
the accusations are nothing but political tricks.

“Go to the courts
and you will see that we are far from the first place,” he said. “There are 50-50
court rulings against us and the opposition.”

But Olga Aivazovska, the election programs coordinator for
OPORA, says that “only dozens of cases reach the
courts, while we have information about hundreds of cases.” 

Kyiv Post staff writer Denis Rafalsky can be
reached at
[email protected] and Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].