The other leading candidates Sergiy Tigipko, Arseniy Yatseniuk, and Victor Yushchenko, who together equaled her total, have refused to support her. Tigipko, with 13 percent, doesn’t care who wins as long as he becomes prime minister. Yatseniuk (7 percent) and Yushchenko (5.5 percent) have called on their supporters to vote against both candidates, knowing that this will favor Yanukovych. In contrast, the communist Petro Symonenko, with 3.5 percent of the vote, has called on his supporters to vote for Yanukovych. With more than half of Tigipko 2.6 million supporters going for him, Yanukovych will surely win.
The vote in the Rada to dismiss the Minister of Interior Ltsenko on January 28 gave another indication that Tymoshenko has little chance of winning. Deputies who normally vote with Tymoshenko’s party in the Rada – the communists, Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn faction and President Yushchenko’s supporters – joined Yanukovych’s Party of Regions to dismiss Lutsenko. Tymoshenko promptly reinstated him on a temporary basis, though his reappointment was probably illegal. Logically it should have been the Regions who should have been punished for occupying the office of that judge in charge of the court adjudicating election violations, and the Ukraina printing house that prints the ballot papers. The Regions got their revenge on Lutsenko for ordering the police to throw them out from the Ukraina printing house.
The electorate has little interest in the crimes of Yanukovych and his cohort. It wants to take its revenge on Tymoshenko for the economic sufferings it is experiencing. She is being punished for being in charge during the recession that has hit Ukraine over the last two years. Never mind that its epicenter was the subprime mortgage market in the United States. The credit crunch impacted on the whole world, nowhere more so than in Ukraine. This is why Yanukovych, despite his attempt to fix the 2004 election, and his image as the head of gangster party, is sleepwalking to victory.
The population’s lack of enthusiasm for Tymoshenko is mirrored most sharply among the new generation of writers. Members of the “thinking society” are less than enthusiastic towards her, and more often hostile. Some will grudgingly vote for her as the lesser of the two evils, while others will not vote for either candidate.
The most political writer of the new generation, Mykola Ryabchuk, author of numerous books and articles on the parlous state of Ukraine’s post-Soviet society, has called on everyone to take part in the election and to vote either against Yanukovych or against both candidates. “Neither of them has any conception of a state with the rule of law; without this, believe me, there can be no profound changes in our lawless country. Consequently, a rational choice suggests that it is necessary to vote for the lesser evil, which for me … would be in this case Tymoshenko.” He advises those who cannot bring themselves to vote for her to vote against both candidates. The worst mistake, he says, would be not to vote at all.
In contrast, the prominent writer Oksana Zabuzhko calls for everyone to come out against both candidates. “Don’t support either candidate. Firstly, this is the only way ‘not to play with cheats in their reckless games’ – and not to collaborate with the newly elected in their past and future crimes before God and history.” She too calls on everyone to vote, but to vote against both candidates; “rejecting both candidates is the best way to proclaim as loudly as possible that Ukraine is not ‘hers’, not a ‘[criminal] zone’, not a ‘bordello’, not ‘a place to seize’ the natural gas transportation system; Ukraine is us, and we categorically say ‘no’ to ‘them’. And for now we say it peacefully.”
Zabuzhko’s militant call to vote against both candidates fails to take into consideration that most elections around the world involve an unpalatable choice of the lesser of two evils. For example, it could be argued that if George W. Bush hadn’t won by a tiny percentage, there would have been no invasion of Iraq. In the context of Ukraine, this election could determine in the worst case whether Ukraine will become a European state or a vassal of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or in the best scenario, that it will become Europe’s first state ruled by a criminal gang.
Not everyone believes that the election of Yanukovych will spell catastrophe for Ukraine. “In Ukraine certain processes have assumed the characteristics of healthy tendencies, and no one will be able to break them”, argues the very able academic and political commentator, historian Yaroslav Hrytsak. He disagrees with Zabuzhko’s call to vote against both, because in practice it would favor Yanukovych, and thus he calls for a vote for Tymoshenko.
However, he says intelligent people should accept that they have lost this election regardless of which candidate wins. He calls for people who oppose both candidates to clearly learn and understand why they have no choice, so they can create a healthy political alternative and organize themselves for the next election. Hrytzak’s election advice is probably the best that anyone will provide for the disillusioned: vote for the lesser evil, and organize for a better choice next time around.
P.S. For Oksana Zabuzhko’s views see her interview with Anna Yashchenko, UNIAN, Jan. 26, 2010, Mykola Ryabchuk’s views come from the interview by Ksenya Lesiw, UNIAN, Jan. 21, 2010, and Yaroslav Hrytzak’s from the interview by Ksenya Lesiv, UNIAN, Jan. 23, 2010.
Jaroslav Koshiw is a former deputy editor of the Kyiv Post, and a writer.
