You're reading: National presidential debates don’t offer much drama

In just three days, Ukrainians will take to the polls to vote in the first presidential election since the EuroMaidan Revolution toppled former President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22.

Ukrainians have had a chance to learn more about the 21 candidates on the ballot from state television station First Channel, which has hosted a series of national debates over the past several weeks. In the debates, candidates gave answers to a series of prepared questions and participated in town hall-style forums, concluding with one-minute stump speeches.

The channel teamed up with a number of nongovernmental organizations, including the Souspilnist Foundation, Center UA, Internews Ukraine and Ukraine’s International Renaissance Foundation, founded by George Soros.

Nearly all 23 presidential candidates for the election expressed their desire to participate in the debates, though two of them – pro-Russian independent candidate Oleh Tsariov and pro-Russian Party of Regions lawmaker Mykhailo Dobkin – didn’t agree to debate’s guidelines.  

Taras Petriv, one of the organizers of the debates, is proud the debates kicked off at such a difficult time for Ukraine: the government in Kyiv is currently is combatting pro-Russian separatists that have seized strategic points in a number of eastern cities.

“It was a challenge for us (to organize) because of tight deadlines…we expected to conduct the debates in 2015,” said Petriv, who heads Souspilnist Foundation.

The team aimed to create a platform for the candidates to discuss important issues. The main difficulty, Petriv says, came as they attempted to create a format for the debates. The organizers studied the US and European Union countries’ debating traditions in order to come up with an effective scheme. 

The debates’ schedule was worked out by the First Channel team so that the candidates wouldn’t know whom they would face and couldn’t prepare for the questions. It was important to do it this way, Petriv explains, because they didn’t want to organize “fake debates.”

All the candidates are given 90 second to answer each question, which helped to limit the “populist narratives,” according to Petriv. Selected questions were divided into four groups – internal policy, foreign policy, economic issues, as well as culture and social policy topics. 

The first round of the debates started on May 9 with presidential candidates Anatoliy Hrytsenko, Olga Bohomolets and Oleksandr Klymenko, and the last of seven is scheduled for May 23 – when Yulia Tymoshenko will face Serhiy Tigipko and Valeriy Konovalyuk. 

Petriv explains that they also decided to conduct the debates using two languages – Russian and Ukrainian, for which they were “heavily criticized.” 

One of the most popular rounds of presidential debates featured three candidates: Petro Poroshenko, Vasyl Tsushko and Zoryan Shkiryak. Still, the debate, like others, left the audience and experts wondering about the real political message of the three participants.

The candidates didn’t clearly outline their ideas on Ukraine’s foreign policy – particularly about whether the country should join any military or political blocks – and didn’t give clear answers on language issue. Most of the contenders blamed Russia and the former Ukrainian government for the poor economic and political situation Ukraine is facing now and agreed the country needs a “strong hand” and must deliberately “fight corruption.” 

Some experts say the debates should have been structured more thematically, in order to force the candidates to focus more on specific issues, rather than repeating soundbites from their presidential platforms. 

Iryna Bekeshkina, who heads the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, believes the format the channel picked wasn’t terribly effective. 

“A minute and a half for an answer is too little,” Bekeshkina says, adding that many candidates lacked argumentation and avoided giving clear answers. 

“It’s clear that the candidates turned out to be unprepared for such debates,” Bekeshkina adds. She suggested that it would have been better to follow the approach taken by the U.S., where presidential candidates discuss several important issues for at least 40 minutes. 

Furthermore, the audience, which consisted mostly of university communities and civic activists, didn’t push candidates outside their comfort zone, and when the audience did ask tough questions, the candidates skirted them.

Oleksiy Haran, a political expert and professor at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, agrees that the country lacks a professional debating tradition. The last major presidential debates were held in 2004 when presidential candidates Viktor Yushchenko met face-to-face with his opponent Viktor Yanukovych. 

As the debates conclude, experts are not sure the conversations have been of much help to the electorate to choose a new president. 

“Now, people are more involved in the news about the situation in the country’s east. So, the debates won’t have that effect they could possibly have had,” Haran explains. “There are two major candidates with Poroshenko leading the race, so the other, less popular candidates couldn’t expect much from [the debates]. But such debates are a good platform for politicians to communicate,” Haran adds. 

Yaroslav Kobzar, a student at Taras Shevchenko National University is certain the new format of debate is more useful, but he won’t make his choice based on the debates, because the candidates failed to give voters a better idea of which candidate is best to choose on May 25. 

“However, this initiative is important now because Ukraine hasn’t had normal debates since 2004,” Kobzar says.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected].