You're reading: Nationalist west now Kuchma turf; runoff hinges on east, south

Leonid Kuchma, a former Soviet missile factory director who several years ago could barely speak Ukrainian, is now the candidate of choice in the country’s traditionally anti-Soviet and heavily pro-Ukrainian western regions. In politics, everything is relative.

Five years ago voters in the regions that border Poland, Hungary and Slovakia rejected Kuchma outright, voting overwhelmingly for then-President Leonid Kravchuk.

In the western Ternopil region, for instance, a tiny 3.7 percent of voters supported Kuchma in the 1994 elections. But nearly 70 percent of those same Ternopil residents voted for Kuchma on Oct. 31, according to figures released by the Central Election Commission.

Besides Ternopil, Kuchma managed to score a majority in the western oblasts of Volyn, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, and in the northern oblast of Chernihiv.

Those mostly rural provinces have a good deal in common, but traditional support for former Soviet nomenklatura representatives like Kuchma is hardly one of them.

Like the Baltic republics, Ukraine’s western regions were annexed to the Soviet Union only before the start of World War II and did not experience the heavy impact of the Soviet economic and regionS, political rule as the other regions of Ukraine did.

Ukraine’s westerners were the first to initiate Ukraine’s drive for independence in the late 1980’s, and most of them are firm advocates of accelerated market reforms and of closer ties with the West.

Kuchma’s record over his first five-year term – sluggish reforms, economic decline and an unclear geopolitical stance somewhere between Russia and NATO – would hardly qualify him as the preferred candidate of Ukraine’s west.

But victory in any election depends not just on one’s own popularity, but on the popularity of one’s opponent.

Petro Symonenko, the leader of Ukraine’s Communist Party and Kuchma’s opponent in the Nov. 14 run-off vote, won in seven regions on Oct. 31. His pitch, which moderated as election day approached, offered voters centralized development planning for big industries, some form of free enterprise in small business and a review of Ukraine’s foreign debt obligations.

The southern Crimean Peninsula and Kherson oblast, as well as eastern regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kirovohrad, Luhansk and Kharkiv, bought that platform, casting more votes for Symonenko than Kuchma. All of them are heavily industrialized and Russian-speaking. Being more populated than Ukraine’s west, Symonenko’s home turf, the east, would seem demographically stronger than Kuchma’s.

However, Symonenko did not manage to win an outright majority in any of the regions, coming closest in Luhansk, where he took 47 percent of the vote.

Also somewhat peculiar was the result of voting in Kuchma’s home town of Dnipropetrovsk. Though much of his present administration comes from this industrial region, only 39 percent of their fellow voters chose to support the incumbent, a percentage just slightly higher than Kuchma’s average nationwide support rate.

Such glitches can be partially explained by the presence of others besides Symonenko and Kuchma on the ballot.

Oleksandr Moroz, who heads the moderate leftist Socialist Party, won in the Vinnytsia and Poltava regions.

Natalia Vitrenko, leader of the radical leftist Progressive Socialist Party and a self-proclaimed ‘true Marxist,’ managed to grab 30 percent of the vote in her home oblast of Sumy.

Now that Moroz and Vitrenko are out of the race, those three oblasts are up for grabs, political observers said.

‘Those regions are critical in the [run-off] election,’ said political analyst Mykhailo Pohrebynsky. ‘They like neither Kuchma nor Symonenko, but now they have to choose between them.’

Regions where Kuchma won – but not by much – are another potential weak spot for the incumbent.

A particularly small percentage of voters – in the 20 percent to 30 percent range – gave Kuchma lukewarm support in the central Zhytomyr, Khmelnytsky and Cherkasy oblasts. Their profile is quite similar: partly industrialized, partly rural, about half Ukrainian-speaking and half Russian-speaking.

For Symonenko to push Kuchma out of office, the Communist Party chief has little choice but to take these regions in the runoff, other political observers said.

‘Symonenko has to expand his base in order to win,’ said analyst Volodymyr Malenkovich. ‘Where Kuchma does not have too much support is the best place for Symonenko to do it.’

Meanwhile, as Symonenko’s drive to get campaigning in those key oblasts stalls, Kuchma has already taken decisive action.

On Oct. 2, Kuchma fired the governors of both Vinnytsia and Poltava – the only regions claimed by Moroz, the Socialist, in the first round.

The next day, Kuchma’s ax fell on the governor of the Kirovohrad oblast, where Symonenko captured the most votes.