The announcement of Oleksandr Moroz's intention to run in next year's presidential election comes as no surprise, although its earliness – more than a year before the vote – is revealing.
Moroz clearly hopes that by putting his hat in the ring now, he can discourage other potential candidates from doing the same. In particular, Moroz needs to convince the Communist Party to back him in the first round of the election. Otherwise, the Communists' candidate will pull the bulk of the leftist vote and knock Moroz out in the first round. If the Communists have any sense, they will realize that would simply throw the second round to President Leonid Kuchma (or, perhaps, to former Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk). But Ukraine's leftists undercut each other much more often than they find common cause.
A victory by Oleksandr Moroz in 1999 would be nothing like the victory of Aleksander Kwasniewski in Poland in 1995 or of Gyula Horn's Socialists in Hungary the year before. Horn and Kwasniewski represent the young, reformist wings of their countries' former communist parties. The closest equivalents in Ukrainian politics are men like Serhy Tyhypko and Roman Shpek; men who have gained somewhat in power since Soviet times and much in public profile, but for the most part remain what they were then: young reformers granted token positions by the entrenched, Brezhnevist elite.
Ukraine's politics has little in common with that of early 1990s Hungary or Poland; a more apt comparison would be to early 1990s Romania or Bulgaria. In all three countries, top Communist leaders themselves manipulated and controlled the change of regimes, staying in power right through. The difference is, Romania and Bulgaria had organized democratic forces ready to take power by the end of 1996; Ukraine still has no such force and will probably continue to be ruled by former communists well into the next century.
Who is Moroz, then? In 1990, with communist regimes fallen or falling across Central Europe, with Soviet Ukraine holding its first partially free parliamentary elections, Moroz helped lead the unreppentant Communist Party's dishonest victory. He then led the majority Communist faction in parliament right up until the party was banned in the wake of the August 1991 putsch in Moscow. Since then he has led one of the more leftist splinters off of the old party, flashing a kinder, gentler red to Kuchma and friends' thin and sloppy coat of blue.
On the other hand, Moroz has reveled in taking the moral high ground over Kuchma every chance he has had. He has stood up for abiding by the constitution, and probably most important, he has stood up for the right of municipalities, raions and oblasts to elect their leaders rather than have them imposed from above. Oblast and raion bosses, and the mayors of Kyiv, Sevastopol, Odessa and Yalta, are all either de jure or de facto presidential appointees.
And though Moroz has often stood up for unrealistic spending promises and added his name to silly resolutions that blame Ukraine's economic crisis on the International Monetary Fund, he has shown signs that he understands he would need the IMF's money if he came to power. A Moroz administration wouldn't be any more earnest in agreeing to economic reforms than Kuchma's administration has been, but it might have more success pushing reforms through parliament.
