Don't even try to find a website for Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, the presidential party that is set to win the most votes in the Oct. 26 parliamentary election. Unless the party's old name is known - Solidarnist - Google won't help.
The bloc is still using the old Solidarnist website as the online base for its campaign platform. Moreover, if one wants to learn what the party stands for, all you have to do is find the program that Poroshenko used in the May 25 presidential election. The text of his bloc’s official platform is recycled. The only difference was replacing the single pronoun “I” with “we” throughout the text.
These things may be symbolic, but they provide a glimpse into what kind of a party Poroshenko’s Bloc is, and what it stands for. It has the highest number of sitting lawmakers of all the political forces competing in the race – a total of 42. By comparison, the closest rival in that sense is Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, with 26 lawmakers currently sitting in the Rada, according to OPORA, the biggest election watchdog.
Poroshenko’s slogan is Living the New Way. Considering the number of old faces in both the proportional ballot and the majority race, the slogan has frequently been target of public criticism.
Some 26.9 percent of Ukrainians who are planning to vote will choose Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, according to the latest survey conducted by Democratic Initiatives Foundation together with Kyiv-based International Institute of Sociology.
There are also young enthusiasts who are coming to the parliament on Poroshenko’s party ticket and want to change the quality of politics in Ukraine. There are about a dozen of young journalists and activists who are new to politics on this list, which constitutes about 6 percent of the official party list of 200 candidates.
“I think when the journalists and civic activists enter parliament it means that political mobilization has started,” says Svitlana Zalishchuk, 31, who heads Chesno civic movement, which is a pro-transparency campaign. She is running the 18th of the party list.
Zalishchuk admits, however, that she does not feel fully comfortable with many people in Poroshenko’s Bloc “whose reputation is battered.”
“I believe it may badly affect party rating as well,” she says, adding that for many young politicians it is a problem on how to get into the parliament. “In order to get something you need to lose first,” Zalishchuk says. “We (young politicians) sacrificed our image and joined so-called ‘old parties’ in order to have a chance to change the system from inside.”
Others like her include former Ukrainska Pravda investigative journalists Serhiy Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem, as well as Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze, executive director of Yalta European Strategy, a non-governmental organization started by billionaire Viktor Pinchuk to promote European integration issues in Ukraine.
Oleksiy Haran, a political expert and professor at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, hopes the civic bloc will come of a great help for the Poroshenko’s party and the parliament itself.
“Those people represent the spirit of EuroMaidan Revolution and they will insist on bringing more radical changes to the parliament,” Haran explains. “However, I’m sure there would be debates between the activists on one hand and the business people on the other, as the last ones are mostly known for their conformist attitude.”
There are also plenty of military commanders on the list, including Crimean Colonel Yuliy Mamchur, Andriy Antonyshchak, coordinator of the first battalion of Ukraine’s National Guard and Azov Battalion member Oleh Petrenko, but election observers are typically skeptical about their potential performance.
“Militants got cart blanche, now that’s why we have many of them on the parties’ lists,” Oleksandr Leonov, the head of Penta center for political studies, said during the news conference in Kyiv on Sept. 19. “But we don’t have any examples when the military people were effective in the parliament.”
But people from the front lines are not the biggest internal threat for Poroshenko’s Bloc. It is dragging many old, unsavory practices to the new Rada from the past.
For example, OPORA recently pointed out that Poroshenko’s Bloc violated the election law by nominating Vitaliy Chudnovsky to run in the majority constituency 200 in Vinnytsia Oblast, without observing a proper procedure for his nomination through the party congress.
Despite Poroshenko’s recent statement that there are no people on his party who had voted for a number of anti-democratic laws on Jan. 16, there is at least one such person sheltered by the party, Vladyslav Atroshenko. He was nominated by the Poroshenko bloc in majority constituency number 206, in Chernihiv Oblast. Poroshenko’s party has not responded to the Kyiv Post request for a comment about this candidate.
Poroshenko himself said at a recent press conference that his party has a lot of people “who in the past had different views,” but are now “respectful people.”
But Vitaliy Bala, head of Situations Modeling Agency, a consultancy, sees it differently. “There are lots of people from the old system and even new politicians who will get there would probably work as a smokescreen,” he says.
Then, there is nepotism.
Oleksiy Poroshenko, the president’s older son, is running in a single-mandate constituency in Vinnytsia region. Poroshenko explained his son just came home from the war zone in Ukraine’s Donbas and decided to run in a constituency. “He didn’t ask my advice and he didn’t hide behind the lists. I’m proud of my son,” Poroshenko said during the news conference.
Moreover, Oksana Bilozir, a godmother of one of Poroshenko’s daughters, is running on his party list. Viktor Baloha, the former Emergency Minister, as well as his brother and his cousin, are nominated by the party in Zakarpattya Oblast.
Bala said that that the set of people supported by Poroshenko’s party will find it difficult to come up with a good road map for Ukraine.
“It may be one of the most incompetent parliaments we’ve ever had and rather heterogeneous one,” Bala explains. “The deputies don’t know why do they need a new parliament. Without clear defined mission, it will be very difficult to find something that will unite this political force.”
However, Iryna Herashchenko, the presidential envoy for eastern Ukraine, is certain the Poroshenko’s Bloc has a clear vision of what to do in a parliament. Herashchenko, who is number nine on the list, said the party will do “everything to make the presidential peace plan work.”
Candidates nominated by the President’s party
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
