Tymoshenko reels in major victory
October 04, 2007 at 00:44cally compromised opponents.
Arguably the most flamboyant figure of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, Tymoshenko has always staked her political career on a personal rapport with the people. President Viktor Yushchenko’s ratings have disintegrated beneath accusations of weakness and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych has been unable to whitewash his reputation of being a thug. Tymoshenko, in turn, successfully became a lightning rod for voter revenge.
Natalia Ligacheva, of the Kyiv-based Telekritika media watchdog NGO, said that the snap election was essentially a protest vote.
“There is a great disappointment among the Ukrainian electorate, especially among Orange voters. Still, they had to vote for someone, and Tymoshenko was the one,” she said.
Tymoshenko fought alongside Yushchenko in his 2004 battle to overturn Yanukovych’s fraud-marred presidential victory. But by the fall of 2005, she had been fired as premier over infighting in the Orange team. By the time Yanukovych returned as premier in 2006 to begin challenging Yushchenko’s hold on executive power, Tymoshenko was comfortable in the opposition and planning an assault to return as premier.
Ligacheva said that although Tymoshenko has a reputation of being populist, she is also seen as someone “who can do something, who can bring about change.”
By comparison, the seemingly never-ending power struggle between Yushchenko and Yanukovych deadlocked the country’s executive, parliament and courts, soiling the image dividends the country gained from the Orange Revolution and the two men’s political reputations at the same time.
As voting stations closed late on Sept. 30, exit polls were showing an upset by Ukraine’s femme fatale.
Contrary to pre-election polls that placed the Bloc of Tymoshenko (Byut) in a distant second place behind Yanukovych’s Regions Party, the braided politician racked up almost a third of the electorate (31 percent) – jumping 9 percentage points from an equally stunning performance in the March 2006 vote.
Although Regions repeated its 2006 showing of 34 percent of the popular vote, Tymoshenko looks set to form a coalition with Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense Bloc, which scored around 14 percent. In doing so, Tymoshenko will regain the premier post lost by the Orange parties under Yushchenko.
Moreover, Tymoshenko will return to head a Cabinet, whose powers have been significantly beefed up in the last year.
Just as Yanukovych didn’t assume Yushchenko’s powers overnight, neither did Tymoshenko win over voters in a single election.
During the 2006 parliamentary election, Tymoshenko knocked the president’s bloc into third place with an 8 percentage point gap: Byut got 22 percent of the popular vote while Our Ukraine received less than 14. Simultaneously, the Ukrainian Joan of Arc snatched up around 10 percent from the Regions’ traditional stomping grounds in the Russian-speaking south and east, while firmly establishing herself as the leading political force in previously Socialist-controlled Central Ukraine.
This time around, Tymoshenko won 15 out of Ukraine’s 27 administrative regions (24 oblasts, plus Crimea, Sevastopol and the city of Kyiv). Regions held on to the 11 regions in the east and south that it won in 2006. But Yushchenko’s bloc lost western Lviv and Ivano Frankivsk to Tymoshenko’s tireless campaign machine. Despite a personal endorsement by the president at a rally in Lviv in the run-up to voting, Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense only managed to hold on to the rural Transcarpathia Region, which recorded one of the lowest turnouts.
Ilko Kucheriv, of the Western-funded exit poll organizer, Democratic Initiatives Foundation, said 10 percent of the country remained undecided in final pre-election polls, with a quarter of these in Orange-dominated western Ukraine. As many as 4 percent of voters made up their minds on election day, with half of this number deciding in the voting booth, he added.
As in the 2006 election, Tymoshenko campaigned hard in Yanukovich territory – the country’s eastern and southern regions.
“She strengthened her position everywhere, especially in central Ukraine,” Kucheriv said.
But as the election neared, the gains being made by Tymoshenko were understated in most pre-election polls, which showed her with weaker support across the board.
“Around 40-50 percent of pre-election polls were falsified, primarily in the interest of smaller parties.” Kucheriv said, “and not just against Byut.”
One party that improved its standing in the face of the Byut onslaught was the moribund Communist Party of Ukraine.
During independent Ukraine’s first three parliamentary elections, the Communists regularly won about 20 percent of the vote, predominantly supported by elderly people in eastern and southern Ukraine who were nostalgic for Soviet times. But last year, the Communists received only 3.6 percent of the votes, barely clearing the 3 percent hurdle.
With their voter base dying off or subsumed by the Moscow-friendly Regions party, the Communists have largely been written off as a future political force.
But like Byut, the Communists gained from this year’s protest vote to raise their take to over 5 percent.
“The Communists are like zombies: dead but still walking,” said Kyiv-based political analyst Vadym Karasyov.
The Socialists, the fifth faction in the last parliament, will not be in this Rada at all.
Analysts attribute the Socialists’ loss to voter revenge and protest vote: Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz, who stood alongside Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution, is widely perceived as betraying his Orange comrades in return for being appointed parliamentary speaker last year.
And Regions leader Yanukovych is also not expected to escape the wrath of his people.
“He won the elections but lost the party,” said Karasyov, adding that Regions moneybags Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, is already grooming another person to lead the east.
This man, according to Karasyov, is Volodymyr Lytvyn, former speaker and head of ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s administration.
“He [Lytvyn] has long maintained good ties with the Orange and the Blue,” Karasyov said.
And now, Lytvyn’s bloc will join Byut, the Regions, the Communists and the president’s bloc as the new fifth faction in the new parliament.
Lytvyn has yet to reveal his party’s coalition plans, but according to Karasyov, his return to Ukrainian politics was financed by Akhmetov and other business interests.
Lytvyn is more diplomatic than Yanukovych and would be more acceptable to the Regions business wing, with the party’s post-Soviet wing expected to bear less and less influence, he explained.