Announces plan to run for president
oroz has announced his intention to run in next year's presidential election, setting the stage for a formidable leftist challenge to President Leonid Kuchma's re-election drive.
Moroz, 54, has led the Socialist Party since 1991, but is best known for his term as speaker of parliament from 1994-1998. In that post, Moroz often led the leftist-dominated parliament into tense showdowns with Kuchma and his successive governments.
Moroz had long been expected to challenge Kuchma for the presidency, but declined to disclose his intentions until Sept. 21, when the Socialist Party's political council voted to recommend their leader as the party's presidential candidate.
'We think that our candidate is the strongest personality [Ukraine's parties] can produce,' said Vitaly Shybko, the Socialist Party's campaign secretary.
The party won't make its final decision until a December congress, and candidates won't be registered until several months after that. But those steps are expected to be mere formalities.
The most important decision for Moroz will be made at the congress of another party – the Communist Party, which has a much bigger and more loyal voter base than Moroz and his Socialists.
Shybko said the Socialists have no agreement with the Communists so far.
'It would not be normal to have two nominees from the leftist forces,' Shybko said. 'But the Communists keep saying they will decide everything at their plenary session.'
Moroz might also find supporters in another camp: the Hromada party, led by former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Yulia Tymoshenko, the party's other main figure, recently said she would support Moroz for president. Both Lazarenko and Tymoshenko are thought to be billionaires.
The Socialists say there is no formal agreement with Hromada, but the party might throw its support behind Moroz since Lazarenko's and Tymoshenko's names have been widely smeared.
'They might support [Moroz] if their struggle with power gets even worse,' Shybko said. Recently, Ukraine's prosecutor general accused Tymoshenko of corruption on national television; both her and Lazarenko have been accused of corruption many times in the past, starting with accounts in Western media when Lazarenko was prime minister.
If the Communists back Moroz, he should have no problem placing among the top two vote-getters in the election's first round and would be hard to beat in the final run-off. With the Communists' infantry and Hromada's money behind him, Moroz would be formidable indeed.
'He is the only man in this country who to date has resources for a full-scale presidential campaign,' said Oleksandr Stehny, a political analyst with SOCIS-Gallup.
But if the Communists put forward their own candidate, Moroz would need a miracle to make it past the first round, even with Hromada's support. It is also possible Hromada's support could backfire by giving Kuchma a tool to tar Moroz. So far Kuchma has been unable to connect Moroz to corruption.
In the 1994 presidential election, Moroz got 13 percent of the vote in the first round, placing a distant third behind Kuchma and former President Leonid Kravchuk.
Moroz's Socialists did even worse in the March 1998 parliamentary elections. Running jointly with current parliamentary speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko's Peasants Party, the Socialists pulled only 8.5 percent of the vote.
That poor showing spelled doom for Moroz's desire to return to the speaker's chair, which Kuchma was determined to prevent because it kept Moroz in the public eye. Moroz's unwillingness to accept defeat was the main reason parliament deadlocked for two months before deciding on Tkachenko.
In the latest opinion poll by SOCIS-Gallup, not yet released as of press time, just 7 percent of Ukrainians said they would vote for Moroz if the elections were held now. However, the only man ahead of Moroz was Kuchma, with 15 percent, while 50 percent of those polled said they did not know who they would choose.
'It's still premature to talk about leadership in the campaign when half of the people are undecided' Stehny said.
Other recent polls have shown Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko in the lead among potential presidential candidates with more than 20 percent of voters' support.
One of the few native Kyivans with a prominent position in national politics, Moroz worked his way up through the city's Communist Party and then Soviet Ukraine's Agriculture Ministry. In 1990 he won election as a deputy in Ukraine's Supreme Soviet and was head of the Communist Party's majority faction in that parliament until the party was banned in the aftermath of the August 1991 putsch in Moscow.
As Speaker, Moroz earned a reputation as a master of the art of parliamentary politics, who always knew where the votes would fall before they were counted and could usually find the extra few he needed in tight votes.
Unlike most other politicians who held high positions in Ukraine's former communist regime, Moroz has largely stuck to his roots, often defending the Soviet Union's achievements at leftist rallies on May Day, Lenin's birthday and anniversaries of the Bolshevik Revolution.
But while most other leftists have leaned heavily on fiery, populist rhetoric, Moroz is exceptionally diplomatic. And though as speaker he opposed most reforms put forward by Kuchma, he occasionally used the position to help Kuchma push through key laws needed to get International Monetary Fund money. One such incident led his former sidekick, Natalia Vitrenko, to bitterly split with him and form her own hardline leftist party.
Moroz also took every opportunity to claim the high ground over Kuchma when the president pushed undemocratic measures, particularly during debates leading to the adoption of the Ukrainian Constitution in 1996. Most analysts agree that without Moroz's deft use of his speaker position, the constitution would have been considerably weaker.
One of Moroz's most tense showdowns with Kuchma was over a law that took away Kuchma's power to appoint provincial administrators by making those positions elected. Kuchma refused to implement the law despite repeated votes by parliament overriding his veto.
Besides Kuchma and Symonenko, there is one other serious contender for the presidency: former Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk, whose Social Democratic Party is like a club for rich Komsomol officials-cum-businessmen. But the former KGB general's party did miserably in this year's parliamentary elections, barely getting 4 percent of the vote through massive vote-buying in dirt-poor Transcarpathia.
Dark horses include former Justice Minister Serhy Holovaty, Progressive Socialist Party leader Natalia Vitrenko and Rukh deputy Bohdan Boiko.
