You're reading: Guide To Oct. 25 Local Elections

With elections for local offices being held in most parts of the nation on Oct. 25, Ukrainians will get another chance to shape the nation's political leadership following last year's EuroMaidan Revolution.

Elections will not take place in Russian-annexed Crimea and Russian-occupied areas of the eastern Donbas. But elsewhere, voters will elect more than 10,000 mayors and more than 160,000 city council members.

As Ukraine moves to decentralize political power away from Kyiv, these officeholders will become a more important part of the governance of the nation. Their powers include managing local budgets and other community resources as well as overseeing distribution of land.

The next local elections will take place in 2020, under current law, or as early as 2017 if parliament passes changes now under consideration.

The outcome of the Oct. 25 contests will also provide a clear signal about the mood of the voters towards candidates associated with political parties already in power in parliament.

The nation will also be on the lookout for whether opposition forces aligned with ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled power on Feb. 22, 2014, still pack any political punch.

“Unlike at national elections, there is a gigantic amount of resources and risks for each territory and constituency at the local elections,” Olha Aivazovska, head of OPORA election watchdog, told the Kyiv Post.

With the stakes so high, the 50-day election campaign is shaping up as competitive, expensive — with spending safely estimated in the millions of dollars — and full of attempts at cheating already.

Big and small parties
More than 200,000 candidates from 132 political parties have registered for these elections, according to the Central Election Commission.

Four parties have good chances to pass a 5-percent threshold and get into the local councils, a recent poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows.

Those include three parties in the ruling parliamentary coalition: The Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko, ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party and the Samopomich party led by Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy.

The fourth force doing relatively well in the polls is the Opposition Bloc, formed from ex-allies of Yanukovych. They have been polling at 5.5 percent countrywide.

The resurgence and political revival of Tymoshenko could be one of the biggest storylines of the election. Her party is now dominating the polls with 9.3 percent, thanks to her populist message.

The other storyline is the almost total collapse of political support for Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his People’s Front party, part of the ruling coalition. Amid his critically low ranking — as low as 1 percent in some polls — Yatsenyuk decided not to participate in these elections.

In western Ukraine, the nationalist Svoboda party may re-enter the politics with 4.4 percent support. It is followed by the Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko, 4.2 percent, and Right Sector, 4 percent, in this region.

However, many voters are undecided and may stay that way right up until Election Day.

Polls also show that some newly formed parties may compete with political heavyweights in a number of regions. In eastern Ukraine, the UKROP (dill) party, backed by former Dnipropetrovsk governor and a billionaire tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky, may get 5.8 percent.

Communist Party forces will try to come back into politics through a newly formed party Nova Krayina (New Country), which may get up to 3 percent of votes in southern Ukraine.

But Volodymyr Fesenko, head of Penta political think tank, said this party has a low chance for success since it’s not allowed to exploit the communist brand, which is crucial for their elderly and nostalgic electorate.

Some former allies of Yanukovych will participate in local elections through the newly formed parties Nash Kray (Our Land) and Vidrodzhennia (Revival.) Analysts give both forces a chance in some regions of eastern Ukraine, where they will mostly compete with the Opposition Bloc.

“These elections will ensure party pluralism, without a monopolist winner,” Fesenko said.

Fesenko said that the local elections will reverberate nationally, with people questioning whether the ruling parliamentary coalition will hold together. As such, these local elections could be a dress rehearsal for a future parliamentary campaign.

Valentyna Romanova, an expert on regional politics at New Ukraine think tank, said that after entering the local councils, many candidates can easily change their political affiliations.

“We already see that deputies of one parties participate in the lists of other political forces,” she said.

Costly, dirty campaign
Even though the elections are for local offices, the candidates are campaigning on national issues of war and peace, reforms, taxes, tariffs and subsidies — yet another indication, Fesenko said, that politicians see these elections as preparation for the next national contests.

Assuming nothing happens to trigger early elections, the next presidential and parliamentary elections will not come until 2019.

Aivazovska of the OPORA watchdog said the campaign is marked by excessive advertisement at the expense of grassroots meetings. “When there are three billboards of one party in distance of three meters between them, it really looks like a vanity fair,” she said.

With the mixed electoral system, the party sponsors have to finance both the parties and the particular candidates, which requires huge resources and creates different financing schemes.

And where does the money come from? Much of it from oligarchs, although Ukraine’s campaign financing has little transparency and few rules that are followed.

Fesenko said the oligarchs try to ensure their powers by supporting different political forces.Kolomoisky is commonly associated with UKROP but also has a “partner relations” with Vidrodzhennia. The Opposition Bloc is sponsored by ex-Yanukovych chief of staff Serhiy Lyovochkin, gas mogul Dmytro Firtash and billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, depending on the region, Fesenko added.
In Kyiv, renting a typical billboard for a month costs Hr 4,000, according to Media Prostor advertisement agency. Total spending on billboards, print and local TV ads is estimated at up to Hr 80 million, almost $3.8 million.

But it’s almost impossible to calculate the total expenses of political forces, including paying campaign workers and bribing voters, Fesenko said.

Aivazovska said the high expenses for the campaign is evidence of corruption risks.
“Not everyone knows that deputies of local councils even don’t get any salary for their work, they are volunteers. But when such huge resources are being spent for campaign, it’s clear there will be a big will of both parties and candidates to get this money back” in favors, Aivazovska said.

Even though bribing voters is illegal, candidates fearlessly hand over food, gifts and money to carry favor among voters. More than 50 political parties started their campaign before being officially registered, allowing them to escape accountability, Aivazovska said.

Another violation is common ignorance of a gender quota — the requirement of the new election law for parties to have a minimum 30 percent of women in their party lists.

Where cheating is high
While observers find violations all over the country, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa and Kharkiv oblasts are the most competitive and, thus, the most at risk for shenanigans.

People displaced by Russia’s war and election observers picket a parliament committee meeting on Sept. 14 in Kyiv. They demanded that lawmakers allow more than 1.2 million displaced persons to vote on Oct. 25.

In Dnipropetrovsk, where political representatives of tycoons Kolomoisky and Akhmetov compete for local power, armed men have already been seen at meetings of election officials, Aivazovska said.

In Kyiv, where Vitali Klitschko hopes to be re-elected as mayor, he has 27 competitors, including former Kyiv Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko, Dnipropetrovsk native Gennady Korban, Kyiv restaurateur Sergiy Gusovsky and controversial Ukrainian lawyer turned politician Tetyana Montyan. The polls show that Klitschko has 22 percent support, short of the majority to get elected in the first round.
Andriy Mahera, deputy head of the Central Election Commission, said the biggest problems usually emerge on polling day and during the vote count. “These are the crucial parts of the election process,” he said.

Mahera believes there is also a risk of violence for voters and election officials in the parts of the Donbas that are close to the war zone. The Central Election Commission decided to cancel elections in 91 local councils of Donetsk Oblast and 31 local councils of Luhansk Oblast, mostly in rural areas.

While the governors of the two embattled oblast say the elections shouldn’t be held anywhere in Donbas over the high “risks of destabilization,” some experts criticize the deprivation of the voting rights.

On Oct. 6, head of Central Election Commission Mykhailo Okhendovsky spoke about organizing local elections in separatist-held parts of the Donbas next year.

“How to explain the fact that the elections will eventually take place on the territories (of the Donbas) uncontrolled by Ukraine, but they won’t happen on all of the government-controlled territories?” Romanova said. “It looks very bad.”

Without voting rights

As of Sept. 28, Ukraine had more than 1.2 million residents who left their homes in Russian-occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas area. These internally displaced people are dispersed all over Ukraine, but remain registered at their former homes. So they will not be able to vote in the local elections because lawmakers failed to pass legislation enabling them to do so.

Aivazovska believes this is a violation of human rights potentially leading to social unrest. “Voting rights for IDPs will help to avoid social upheavals and political cataclysms,” she said. “But our country took another way, deciding to ignore these people.”

Gennady Korban, a candidate for Kyiv mayor, walks together with his team members on Oct. 6 along the Kyiv’s main Khreschatyk street.

Aivazovska said that most lawmakers of the presidential party blocked draft laws that could allow the internally displaced persons to vote as they believe these people would mostly support their rivals from the Opposition Bloc.

“It’s very sad that politicians take decisions based not on guarantees of people’s rights, but on their political interests,” she said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post staff writers Olena Goncharova and Veronika Melkozerova contributed to this story.