Why did Yulia Tymoshenko lose her presidential bid in 2010? Most answers to this question have completely ignored an obvious factor: gender. It is commonplace to hear it said in Ukraine that ‘politics is not a place for women’. Occasionally, we even hear that a ‘woman’s place is in the kitchen’ (this claim was publicly made by Viktor Yanukovych during the election campaign). Indeed, such traditionalistic attitudes are considered to be more prevalent within the ‘Orange electorate,’ much of which originates in the country’s Western region and in rural areas of Central Ukraine.
Yulia Tymoshenko has been struggling with the complex gender dynamics of Ukrainian politics throughout her career as a public figure. Studies of political discourse find that today a woman in Ukraine is expected to be a Berehynia (hearthguardian) – a devoted mother or wife who tends to the home and family.
As such gender scholars as Oksana Kis have found, a second model of femininity also exists: the sex symbol, or ‘Barbie.’ These models discourage Ukrainians from seeing women as viable political leaders.
Tymoshenko has had to prove herself capable of meeting and exceeding these gendered expectations. Cast by her detractors as the ‘Gas Princess’ and ‘oligarch in skirts’ (i.e. too sexy, but not Ukrainian enough) she learned to speak Ukrainian, allied herself with traditionalist Victor Yushchenko, donned her signature wrap-around peasant braid, and became the ‘Goddess of the Revolution’. During the recent presidential campaign, she typically appeared in public as the ‘Mother of the Nation’, clad in chaste white embroidered folk garb. In her speeches, she constantly reassured the public that she was a traditional woman who valued nurturing and cooperation (and prayer), and wanted to become president not because she sought power but because she cared so deeply about the needs of her ‘family,’ the Ukrainian nation.
Despite her impressive performance, increasing her vote from 25 to 45 percent between rounds one and two, she lost the elections. Why?
Exit polls suggest a gender gap indeed existed within the ‘Orange’ electorate: women were more likely to vote for her than men were. Tymoshenko did slightly worse among men than women (44.6 percent of men versus 46.4 percent of women who were polled voted for her). Men were also somewhat more likely than women to vote against both candidates in round two. Yanukovych, by contrast, did almost equally well among men (48.8 percent) and women (48.5 percent). ‘Orange’ women were more likely to support Tymoshenko than their male counterparts.
But this gender gap in voting is not the full story: voter turnout in general was far lower than in 2004. Many voters simply opted out of this election (in 2010, Yanukovych received around 9.6 million votes and Tymoshenko around 9 million votes; meanwhile, in 2004, Yanukovych received 12 million and Yushchenko 15 million).
Tymoshenko failed to receive the backing of around six million ‘Orange’ voters. Perhaps we might thus consider her loss to be the result of ‘Orange camp’s’ more general failure to enact a democratic revolution by empowering the grassroots activists who flooded the streets of Ukraine in 2004 to enter politics and challenge local, corrupt political machines?
My own conversations and research with women protesters and activists at the local level in Lviv and Kharkiv found three factors explained their support for this historic display of People Power. First, many framed Tymoshenko more positively than even Yushchenko after the Orange Revolution. Protesters, who referred to Tymoshenko as Ukraine’s ‘Joan of Arc’, followed her because they believed that she would fight for Ukraine’s interests. Second, most rejected the notion that Yanukovych, a twice convicted criminal, could represent Ukraine as a political leader. Third, many understood their participation in the Orange Revolution as a ‘social contract’; that is, they supported the revolution not simply because of the personal qualities they saw embodied by Yushchenko or Tymoshenko, but because these leaders promised to turn Ukraine into a European nation-state.
So while traditional gender biases existed within the Orange electorate, they do not offer an adequate explanation for why Tymoshenko’s later quest for the presidency failed. Tymoshenko didn’t lose (as some have surmised) because the ‘Berehynia’ myth inevitably consigns women to the home. Indeed, my research suggests that the ‘Berehynia’ image is a potent one that mobilized many women into politics, led many to support Tymoshenko in 2004 and legitimated their role as a national revolutionary.
So to explain Tymoshenko’s defeat, my sense is that we have to incorporate gender dynamics but also recognize that this factor interacted with a general tactical failure on the part of the Orange leadership. Ukraine’s democratic revolution failed to disrupt the patriarchal dynamics of political machines.
We need to identify some of the directions Tymoshenko can go in the future to recast herself as a revolutionary leader. We need to seek to understand the potential she has for mobilizing into formal politics the grassroots actors that exist outside the control of local political systems, in particular, women’s organizations.
Tymoshenko’s 2010 defeat results in large part because the revolution itself failed to mobilize the grassroots into politics. ‘Activists’ remained outside the local political system after the Orange Revolution. Women activists after the revolution wanted to become more politically involved but continued to play subordinate roles performing the ‘housework’ of Ukrainian elections (such as serving on precinct electoral commissions). Nearly all precinct level work in Ukrainian elections is now performed by women: this is a subject that has come up periodically in the reports of international observers and is of enduring interest for gender scholars but perhaps more broadly, policy analysts and social scientists interested in Ukraine’s transition.
This concentration of women at the bottom of the electoral system, together with the blocked mobility women activists describe to myself in my research, are enduring political legacies of the Soviet era as well as the Leonid Kuchma presidency. They help explain why we should consider Tymoshenko’s defeat in 2010 to be due to the failure by the Orange camp to enact a true revolution in politics.
Ironically, Yulia Tymoshenko herself also didn’t attempt to mobilize the support of the politically active women leaders of Ukraine; perhaps because doing so might have labeled her a ‘feminist’, a term that she has had to go to great pains to avoid. Had Tymoshenko been able to mobilize women, this might have made a significant difference in how many voters were mobilized to vote for her in the 2010 elections; indeed, some of the voters who voted ‘against all,’ or some of the millions who voted for Yushchenko in 2004 but opted out of voting altogether this time, might have voted for her. Their votes could have made a major difference as Yanukovych won by only a small margin of 3.48 percent and Ukraine would have been the first CIS country to elect a female president.
Alexandra Hrycak is an associate professor of the Sociology Department at Reed College in USA.
