Election Watch: Standoff with nationalistic flavor in Lviv election district - Jul. 19, 2019

LVIV, Ukraine – A Ukrainian nationalistic standoff is brewing in the western city of Lviv, where three hardcore patriotic candidates for parliament are competing against one another in single-mandate electoral district No. 116.

Mykola Kniazhytsky, a lawmaker and former owner of the Espreso TV channel, is taking on Iryna Podolyak, a lawmaker elected from this district in 2014, in the July 21 snap parliamentary election.

The third contender is a scandalous nationalist, former lawmaker Iryna Farion, who was elected here in 2012. She seeks to defeat Podolyak with a more radically nationalistic program.

One thing unites all three of them: their focus on the Ukrainian language.

Knyazhytsky and Podolyak were co-authors of the famous language law that the parliament passed in April 2019. The law aimed to strengthen the role of the Ukrainian language in a country where many still primarily speak Russian.

Although they worked together on the bill, now the two are opponents in the electoral battle.

Their competitor Farion, a Ukrainian linguist turned politician, gained notoriety for her radical defense of the Ukrainian language, which often bordered on xenophobia.

Although all three are high-profile politicians with somewhat similar agendas, none of them may make it to the parliament. They may fall victims of the general trend of the election: a public desire for new faces.

The election of comedic actor Volodymyr Zelensky as president in April has demonstrated that Ukrainians are hungry for change and are tired of familiar faces in politics.

Zelensky’s party, Servant of the People, has barred former Rada lawmakers from its ticket entirely. Similarly, the Voice (Golos) party of rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk has closed its party list to lawmakers from the current parliamentary convocation with a few exceptions in single-mandate districts.

Both Zelensky and Vakarchuk’s parties have their contenders in district No. 116.

Marta Romaniak, head of the information technology office of the Lviv City Council, is running with Voice and Rostyslav Melnyk, a successful Lviv construction developer, is running with Servant of the People.

Romaniak has a good shot of winning with Voice – it’s popular in Lviv in no small part because its leader is a native and well-known in the city. Melnyk, on the other hand, has a much tougher battle.

Lviv Oblast is the only region in Ukraine where the majority did not vote for Zelensky in the presidential runoff election in April, choosing instead to support former President Petro Poroshenko.

And it’s no wonder: Lviv is the stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism, so Poroshenko’s “army, language, faith” rhetoric resonated with local voters. At the same time, Zelensky’s vague stance on Ukraine’s potential membership in the EU and NATO cost him a lot of votes here.

District No. 116 was at the forefront of that support – 70.3 percent of voters here backed Poroshenko. But their candidate lost to a Russian-speaking comedic actor, so many of the voters feel bitterly toward Zelensky and his party. For many, they are outsiders.

Olha Savchuk, a retired hotel manager living in Lviv’s Levandivka suburb, told the Kyiv Post that voting for Zelensky’s party is off the table for her. Instead, she is ready to vote for Kniazhytsky from Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party, Romaniak from Voice or Farion from the nationalistic Svoboda party.

“Because they are our own people,” Savchuk said.

So far, two parties lead in polls conducted by the Info Sapiens research agency in two districts in Lviv — but not in No. 116 — on June 26-July 3. Voice has about 30-percent support among decided voters, while European Solidarity has around 25 percent.

Since Lviv residents tend to vote for candidates in single-member districts based upon their party affiliations, Voice’s Marta Romaniak and European Solidarity’s Mykola Kniazhytsky have the highest chances of winning.

Incumbent deputy

Electoral district No. 116 comprises the Zaliznychyi neighborhood and part of the Shevchenkivskyi neighborhood in the east and north of Lviv, including the suburb of Levandivka and the adjacent towns of Rudne and Briukhovychi. Most of this territory is former villages that were attached to the city in Soviet times, so there are many infrastructural problems.

The current lawmaker representing the district in parliament is Iryna Podolyak, elected by the voters in 2014 with the Samopomich party of Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi. At the time, it was very popular in the city.

Podolyak, 52, was the head of the Lviv City Council’s culture department and continued to work on cultural issues in the Ukrainian parliament as first deputy head of the Rada’s Committee on Culture and Spirituality. The Chesno civic movement included Podolyak among the 25 most honest lawmakers, partly for her support of structural reforms, like transparency in public procurement and the creation of an anti-corruption court.

Among all the deputies from single-member districts in Lviv Oblast, Podolyak received the smallest amount of subventions for her district in 2018, a form of financial aid given for a specific purpose to local budgets from the state treasury. She says that bigger subventions are given to those deputies who are in the pro-government coalition and vote for the state budget.

“Do you want subventions (…) to be divvied up to buy costumes for some folk collectives in district or village cultural centers? Would this benefit the socio-economic development of the region, as subventions should? Absolutely not. It’s a direct carve-up and vote buying at the expense of taxpayers,” Podolyak told the Kyiv Post.

Iryna Podolyak, member of the Ukrainian parliament, talks with the Kyiv Post in front of the Verkhovna Rada on July 11, 2019, in Kyiv. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)

Podolyak could easily have used more subventions to please voters in her district, especially since her popularity has fallen sharply along with the ratings of Samopomich. This was mostly due to a garbage collection crisis in the city that Sadovyi says was orchestrated by Poroshenko.

Currently, Samopomich’s rating stands at 1 percent nationwide and about 7 percent in Lviv, based on the polls by Info Sapiens. This is far from the 22.7 percent Samopomich received here in 2014.

But Podolyak still decided to run with Samopomich, which did not try to rebrand itself.

“I’m not one of the politicians who jump from one political power to another only to get into parliament. I have one such rival – it’s also a current deputy who ran to the Verkhovna Rada with a great number of different parties. Now he has changed his party once again,” Podolyak said.

Nationalistic rivals

Podolyak’s harsh words refer to Kniazhytsky, a current lawmaker who got into parliament on the party list of People’s Front in 2014, and into the previous convocation on the ballot of the Batkivshchyna party in 2012.

In Ukraine’s mixed electoral system, half of the 450-member Verkhovna Rada is elected through proportional representation using closed party lists. The other half is elected from single-member districts, where only one candidate with the most votes makes it to parliament.

This year Kniazhytsky, 51, decided to run for parliament from single-member district No. 116, becoming a rival to Podolyak.

The two are not strangers at all: Kniazhytsky is the head of the Parliamentary Committee on Culture and Spirituality and Podolyak is his deputy. They have worked closely together on several bills, most famously the Ukrainian language law.

Laws initiated by Kniazhytsky that strengthen the status of Ukrainian and establish language quotas on Ukrainian TV and radio have been popular in Lviv, and Kniazhytsky uses this in his campaign messaging. His campaign billboards around Lviv read “Said it! Did it!”

Kniazhytsky initiated the second “Via Carpathia” scientific and cultural forum in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in June, a fact advertised on the forum’s billboards in Lviv. A rich man, he also organized a “family holiday” with games, workshops and live music in June in Levandivka, which is part of district No. 116. There, Kniazhytsky and Podolyak took a picture smiling together under an umbrella.

Kniazhytsky’s costly campaigning adds to the high ratings of his European Solidarity party in the region.

People Front’s lawmaker Mykola Knyazhytsky (second from the left, upper row) sits in the parliament next to Arsen Avakov, now the interior minister, in 2014. (Anastasia Vlasova)

“I know Mykola Kniazhytsky and read his Facebook. I will vote for him,” Volodymyr Andrush, a young advertising agent, told the Kyiv Post in Lviv. “I like European Solidarity’s course toward the European Union and NATO and (I like) their language law.”

One person not happy with Kniazhytsky’s and Podolyak’s language law is Iryna Farion, a member of the nationalistic Svoboda party. She was elected to parliament in 2012 from 116th district with then-popular Svoboda in Lviv, but in 2014 she was defeated by Podolyak.

“My goal is to adopt an adequate language law, not this over-advertised candy that only humiliates the state status of the Ukrainian language, not strengthens it,” Farion told the Kyiv Post.

Farion, 55, is well-known in Lviv and far beyond as a sharp-tongued critic of the government, whose policies are almost never nationalistic enough for her taste. As before, her ultimate goal is a “united, independent and self-sufficient Ukrainian state,” she says.

Ex-lawmaker Iryna Farion is running in the single-mandate constituency No. 116 in Lviv.

“My goal is to prevent ‘Putinoids’ and this liberal rot from taking power. They have done everything for Ze (Zelensky) to become president over these five years (when Svoboda was not in parliament),” Farion says. “If we nationalists won’t enter into parliament, then Ukraine will exit from Ukraine.”

Farion campaigns in the district with printed campaign newspapers and brochures, walking from “eye to eye, from hand to hand.” She is well-known among the district’s voters, but that doesn’t transform into support.

“We’ve known that lady for a long time, but I won’t vote for her. She was a lawmaker once, but she did not do anything,” Andriy Mysak, a businessman from Levandivka, told the Kyiv Post.

According to the Slovo i Dilo fact-checking portal, Farion only delivered on 4 percent of her campaign promises from 2012 while she was in the Rada. Support ratings for her Svoboda party stand at about 2 percent in Lviv, according to the Info Sapiens polls.

Newcomers

One of the most active election campaigners is Rostyslav Melnyk, a candidate with Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. He has billboards not just in the 116th district, but all around Lviv. Melnyk, 41, also has ads on local TV, Facebook and Google.

There’s no doubt that he can afford it – Melnyk is the president and owner of RIEL, the largest construction development company in western Ukraine, with projects as far as Kyiv. Melnyk also has his own charity helping veterans and their children and he founded a rehabilitation center for people with disabilities not far from Lviv.

Melnyk says he is running for parliament to improve conditions for business, create a proper investment climate and reboot the prosecutor’s office, security service and anti-corruption bodies. He says there should be a mechanism to recall lawmakers, both parliamentary and local, who have lost their voters’ confidence.

Melnyk decided to join Servant of the People because the best way to change something is from within the pro-government party, he says.

“Representatives of Lviv should be inside the ruling party. Only from within the party, within the ruling authority can I deliver the opinions and positions of Lviv residents,” Melnyk told the Kyiv Post.

Melnyk’s has only brief experience in politics: he worked as an assistant to a lawmaker. But his father had quite a political career. Leonid Melnyk went from being a member of the center-right People’s Movement of Ukraine party to running the election headquarters of exiled former President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions in Lviv Oblast.

In 2008, Rostyslav Melnyk’s development company bought and demolished the historical villa of Ukrainian composer Yaroslav Yaroslavenko in Lviv. The city council sued the company to restore the building.

But then the two parties came to an agreement: RIEL committed to build a music school on the first floor of its new development project there. Civic activists were not happy and appealed the city’s decision in court.

“As of today, we won all the court cases. I won the appeal. And sometime soon we will start building,” Melnyk says.

Servant of the People comes third in the Info Sapiens polls, trailing behind Voice and European Solidarity with about 16 percent of decided voters’ support.

“I support Zelensky, because all of Poroshenko’s gang obstructs his work,” said Oleh Horin, a retired economist from Shevchenkivskyi neighborhood who will nevertheless vote for former Security Service of Ukraine Chief Ihor Smeshko’s Strength and Honor party. “Zelensky is young, maybe he will work it out, maybe he’ll get a chance.”

The youngest candidate for parliament from district No. 116 is Marta Romaniak, who is running with the Voice party. Romaniak, 34, has been leading the information technology office of Lviv City Council, helping develop IT solutions for city management and digitalized services for the residents.

“IT is primarily about fighting corruption, it’s about economic development, city transparency and attracting investment,” Romaniak told the Kyiv Post.

Romaniak has a law degree and studied civic leadership. She says she is running for parliament to bring more IT solutions to the Ukrainian government.

“We need more online-services, more solutions for cities and the central government for Ukraine to become more modern, rich and attractive for investment. IT in state governance is the best tool to fight corruption and increase transparency,” Romaniak says.

Although Romaniak ran for a seat in the Lviv City Council with former Defense Minister Anatoliy Grytsenko’s Civil Position party in 2015, she says she only decided to run for the Ukrainian parliament after she saw the creation of Voice.

She says she trusted its leader, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, and the people who stood beside him when he first presented the party. One of these was Solomia Bobrovska, former deputy governor of Odesa Oblast, who Romaniak knew personally.

“Voice is a team of young professionals. Each of us has projects he or she implemented for the development of our country,” Romaniak says.

Romaniak has a campaign fund that she uses to print newspapers, brochures and posters. She also will set up several billboards around her electoral district. Based on the Info Sapiens polls, Voice leads in support, with about 30 percent of decided voters backing the party.

“Voice doesn’t just have new faces – they are also professionals I trust,” Volodymyr Dymyda, a young lawyer from Shevchenkivskyi neighborhood, told the Kyiv Post.