When the summer heat subsides and Ukraine’s political leadership returns from vacation, thorny issues will surely return to the forefront of the news. And this will take place in the context of Ukraine’s still nascent system of representative democracy: on the national level, should Ukraine be a parliamentary democracy (like England) or a presidential system (like France), or should it strike a pragmatic balance?
Perhaps more important for most Ukrainians is the matter of how to improve local governance through the enhanced accountability of local and regional elected officials.This could go a long way towards helping Ukraine overcome debilitating regional differences—including linguistic ones.
When voters head to the polls on October 31 to elect regional and local officials, they may well make President Yanukovich’s Party of Regions pay a price for having done so little to expand the power and authority of regional and local government.
Former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.” That pithy statement accords with much of the thinking of America’s Founding Fathers who were concerned to decentralize power and keep it as local as possible (which is not to say the U.S. has not experienced a pronounced centralization of power since the Civil War and especially the New Deal).
It is also in line with the Christian idea (often referred to as “subsidiarity”) that central authorities should only assume responsibility for matters that lower levels of government lack the resources or mandate to handle.
By the same token, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn identified the restoration of local political accountability as an antidote to the poison of the Soviet over-centralization of power, and one of the keys to the regeneration of society at the grass roots.
The Party of Regions has so far failed to realize this.If it is does not come to grips with the issues voters really care about, it will run the risk of a serious political reversal.
The notion that there is a contractual relationship between voters and elected officials at all levels is essential to representative democracy. Voters throughout Ukraine want local government to use more revenue from local taxes to fix poor roads, underperforming schools, and ill-equipped hospitals.
In locales where Ukrainian is not the primary language, voters want their local leaders to deal with the community in their native language, be it Russian, Tatar, Romanian, Rusyn, Hungarian, or otherwise.
The matter of language in Ukraine is, of course, highly contentious but it is intimately related to the matter of regional and local accountability, which, in turn, is closely related to the matter of national regeneration.
In the regions of eastern and southern Ukraine, Russian is the predominant language.People want and expect documentation related to passport and driver’s license applications, business incorporations, court proceedings, medications, and academic assignments in schools and kindergartens, to be done in the majority language.Clearly, language is a regional issue that voters care passionately about and expect their local elected leaders to seriously address.
During the presidential campaign, President Yanukovych promised to empower regional and local governments to make decisions on which local languages will be officially used by local governments.
The Verkhovna Rada has yet to pass legislation in implementation of the European Charter on Regional Languages, which would devolve decision-making authority on language use to local governments.The new administration needs to act quickly on this front.
Yanukovych’s promise to elevate Russian to a second state language alongside Ukrainian, is, of course, a different, if related, matter. As it happens, he seems to be backtracking on his pledge.
Whatever you think of the idea as a matter of policy, to abandon it outright would undermine democratic accountability in Ukraine.Accountability must take place at the national level as well as the local one, and voters have the right to hold the president to his campaign promises.
While President Yanukovych promised a “Ukraine for the people” during his campaign, the Party of Regions is at risk of a breach of “contract” with the voters for failing to recognize and fulfill the electorate’s desire for strengthening the powers of local and regional leaders.
Yanukovych and the Party of Regions will be held accountable if they fail to broaden the responsibility and power of regional and local governments, particularly in areas of importance to local constituencies such as language, health, education, infrastructure, and local tax and spending authority.
Anthony T. Salvia is executive director of the Kyiv-based American Institute in Ukraine. Previously he served as an appointee of President Ronald Reagan to the US Department of State and at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Moscow. The organization’s website iswww.aminuk.org.
