Editor’s Note: The question of Ukraine’s relations with the European Union is, of course, most of all a question for the young and for future generations. Therefore, during 2013-14, a joint venture of NIRAS, a leading Danish development consultancy company, and the BBC, in collaboration with the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, and financially supported by the Danish Foreign Ministry (Danida) are running a number of journalism workshops on how to cover Ukraine-EU issues. The participants are young journalists from all over Ukraine. On pages 8 to 13, NIRAS/BBC – in partnership with the Kyiv Post – brings five of the best pieces, demonstrating the variety in focus and styles of the country’s young journalists, and, not least, their budding talent for grasping complex issues.
We won’t be forced to write the code’
The discussions and roundtables held by the Ministry of Justice are merely attempts to buy time and maintain the image that the law-making process is being addressed, experts say.
Vitalii Kulyk, Deputy Head of the Chief Directorate for Constitutional and Law Modernization, Administration of the President of Ukraine, said: “No electoral code will have been adopted before the Vilnius summit – there is no consensus among the political parties, and the people from the president’s administration refuse to write the code (under coercion).”
Civil society organizations like Opora and the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CEU) are in favor of adopting a new and radically changed electoral code. Their key argument is that elections at all levels must take place according to the same principles. The code unifies procedures for all kinds of elections: municipal, parliamentary, and presidential. The principles behind election commissions, nomination of candidates, allocation of funds and other technical aspects would be the same and clear to all stakeholders.
Olha Aivazovska, an Opora expert, believes the time has come to change the election system. “Kliuchkovskyi’s Code (now under consideration in parliament) is revolutionary to Ukraine as it regards the attempt of harmonizing the legislation which regulates the election process,” she said.
Political parties here think about the election law only when they are in power, Aizazovska added, otherwise they do their best with what is available. Nobody fights for common rules, instead they consider how the situation can be best used to their advantage, she said.
What if proportional system had stayed?
The law on electing members of parliament was last amended in November 2011, less than one year before parliamentary elections. The threshold for getting into parliament was raised from 3 to 5 percent and the proportional, closed-list-based system was replaced by a mixed system. According to international experts and observers, the Party of Regions, then dominating the parliament but at the same time losing public support, was forging a victory in advance by systematically pushing through changes in the election system.
The logic of the party of power can easily be explained: basically, proportional voting allows poor and popular parties to gain a strong result while majoritarian voting (also called “first-past-the-post”) provides such an opportunity to rich ones and those controlling so-called “administrative resources.”
According to Andrii Mahera, deputy chair of the Central Election Commission, “…a mixed election system carries in itself all shortcomings of the proportional and majoritarian systems.” His words fell on lawmakers’ deaf ears.
The draft code, now under parliamentary consideration, suggests keeping the mixed election system. According to Aivazovska from Opora, it is the code’s key defect. “It is as though there had been no massive vote rigging at the last elections, or that we were not still waiting for by-elections in five constituencies where reruns were ordered,” she said.
Ordinary voters, experts and politicians have quite different ideas about what would be the ideal election system. According to a survey conducted by the Razumkov Center, 40 percent of Ukrainians prefer a majoritarian election system, which can show a clear connection between a candidate and voters.
However, neutral experts regard a return to the single mandate system as unacceptable, because it fails to take the votes of a great number of people into account. The result is distorted: voters “treasure” their votes and support the parties that have the highest chance to make it into parliament, they say. The majoritarian system also provides wide opportunities for vote buying or administrative interference.
The proportional election system based on closed lists, according to which the elections in 2006 and 2007 were held, has also shown its deficiencies. The situation when party leaders independently rank candidates and decide who should be included in the upper part of the party’s list and who should be left at the bottom, promotes elitist corruption. People with money buy spots in the upper list to secure their entry into parliament. A seat in the Verkhovna Rada means protection against criminal prosecution, which some seek. The result has been turncoats and party-switchers getting in, and allegations of authoritarian rule against party leaders. The most recent past illustrates this: 52 deputies switched party factions, one was convicted for murder and continuous corruption-related scandals accompanied the work of the sixth convocation of parliament.
Elections in 2012 were held according to the mixed election system. Half of the parliament, 225 deputies, was elected through the majoritarian system, whereas the remaining 225 were elected by the proportional system.
As already mentioned, the law was openly amended to secure a majority for the Party of Regions, which according to international observers ensured victory for many of its majoritarian candidates by using administrative pressure and voter bribery. Raising the election threshold to 5 percent prevented small parties from making it to the parliament, and their votes were allocated among those who surmounted the threshold. This happened to about 7 percent of votes (15 parliamentary seats were divided among the five parties that entered the Rada).
Data from the last election illustrates the extent to which the type of electoral system affects the result. If we imagine that the parties won the same support in single-mandate constituencies as in the national one, namely: the Party of Regions – 30 percent, Batkivshchyna – 25.54 percent, UDAR – 13.96 percent, the Communist Party of Ukraine – 13.18 percent, Svoboda – 10.44 percent.
First, we should calculate how many seats (out of 450) the parties get proportionally to the vote percentage they gained, and then add a coefficient for surplus seats allocated from the 5 percent left. In doing so, we get a situation that differs greatly from the one we currently have. The opposition parties would have gained dozens of seats, which could have helped them create a stable majority.
How to improve proportional election
The proportional system, too, has its shortcomings. The main one is that voters have no chance to control the list formation process and actually vote for the top ten well-known faces. Election law expert Oleksandr Chernenko points out that both proportional and mixed election systems fell short of expectations. “We need to overcome this phase and allow the voter to form by him or herself the lists of candidates he or she wants to see in the parliament,” he said.
The open-list-based proportional system calls for a change in the organization of constituencies. Instead of a single national constituency, the country should be divided into several small ones for the voters to know the people they are being asked to vote for, experts argue. The core of the system is that the voter gives preference to the candidates they trust most of all. This allows the creation of strong regional lists and introduces competition within political parties.
While the proportional system provides a quantitative majority to oppositional parties, the open-list-based system promotes their qualitative renovation. People vote for those they know and trust.
Political scientist Oleksiy Haran emphasizes that the open-list-based proportional election system would revitalise the country’s political system. “The parties would turn into real political institutions, and parliament members would stop being puppets in the party bosses’ hands,” he said.
Oleh Budzinskyi is a journalism student at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.
