In the election season, business conferences in Ukraine can look more like campaign rallies, as presidential candidates show up to assure business leaders of their commitment to improving the country’s investment climate.
So it was no surprise that the March 31 presidential election was the key topic at the annual Dragon Capital investor conference on Feb. 12, and two of the top-five candidates showed up to pitch their policies.
In his opening remarks to the conference, President Petro Poroshenko, who is seeking re-election, said he was there not as a candidate but as the incumbent head of state.
Nevertheless, he made some election pledges for the next five years: to boost tourism numbers to 30 million visitors; to raise Ukraine’s fortunes in the Doing Business ranking; to stick to Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic foreign-policy course; to open up the land market, and to privatize state-owned enterprises.
He also promised to submit to parliament a draft bill introducing a tax on distributed profits instead of income tax, and a draft bill on establishing a new national bureau for financial investigations.
Speaking about the challenges facing Ukraine, Poroshenko said he would reveal some information about Russia’s interference in the Ukrainian election process at the Munich security conference on Feb. 15-17.
“Unfortunately, Russia is very active. Its goal is to stop our movement to the West and to bring Ukraine back under Russian influence,” Poroshenko said.
Without naming his main political opponent, Batkivshchyna leader and one of the leading candidates for president, Yulia Tymoshenko, he nevertheless took her to task for some of her decisions during her tenure as prime minister, which led to temporary sugar and petroleum shortages in the country.
Tymoshenko could not respond in person, as she had canceled her attendance at the Dragon Capital conference. A week earlier, she had also struggled to win over the business community at a special event held by the European Business Association.
However, she passed along a message through Alex Ryabchyn, a lawmaker with her 20-member Batkivshchyna faction in parliament. Ryabchyn said that Tymoshenko had already met with the majority of the audience and dispelled all the myths told about her. For the rest, she reiterated her pledges: “The pro-European course will continue; cooperation with the International Monetary Fund will continue; and debts will be repaid.”
Sociologists’ forecasts
Until recently, the presidential election looked like it would be a two-horse race between Tymoshenko and Poroshenko.
But that was before comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy took the lead in polls. It now looks like he could secure a spot in the second round.
Inna Volosevych, the deputy director at the Info Sapiens research agency, said that the main question is now whether Zelenskiy will be able to mobilize enough young voters to turn out for the vote. He has the highest rating among young people under 30, while Tymoshenko is traditionally the most popular among elderly people over 60. However, voter turnout among the young tends to be lower than that among the elderly.
“For now, Zelenskiy has a good chance of winning,” Volosevych said during the conference, speaking on a panel with sociologists and political experts.
Even Iryna Bekeshkina, the director of the National Democratic Initiatives think tank, who used to be skeptical about Zelenskiy’s chances of making it to the runoff, has now changed her forecast: Zelenskiy’s rating is growing fast (from 8 percent in December to 16 percent in January), and his “ingenious election campaign is worth entering into textbooks,” Bekeshkina said.
She said that Zelenskiy’s breakthrough was being driven by several factors: a protest vote, his television fame, and populist appeal.
“Young people don’t want to vote for established politicians. Svyatoslav Vakarchuk is not running. So many think: May it be Zelenskiy, just not the old ones,” Bekeshkina said.
“He knows what his voter base wants to hear. He emphasizes that he is not a politician, and says the president has to be honest and firm in his principles above all.”
Zelenskiy, in the meantime, has given few media interviews and public speeches, instead touring Ukraine with his comedy group, Kvartal 95.
However, political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said that although Zelenskiy is now leading in the polls, it’s too early to write Tymoshenko off.
“Indeed, she has stagnated in the polls, but her voter base is very solid. They are elderly people and residents of rural areas. They can be missed by the pollsters,” Fesenko said.
All sociologists agreed that this year’s election is more unpredictable than previous ones. The good news is that no matter who wins the presidency, Ukraine’s pro-western course and foreign policy won’t change.
Q&A with Grytsenko
With less than seven weeks left before Election Day, it’s unlikely that another candidate could replace someone in the leading trio of Zelenskiy, Tymoshenko, and Poroshenko, said Volosevych from Info Sapiens.
“If it weren’t for Zelenskiy, Anatoliy Grytsenko would have a chance. Their voter bases intersect,” she said.
But the former Defense Minister Grytsenko says he doesn’t set much store by the polls — he ranked fifth in recent surveys, below the pro-Russian opposition lawmaker Yuriy Boyko.
“The real sociology will happen (on Election Day) on March 31,” he said as he sat down at the conference with Dragon Capital CEO Tomas Fiala for a Q&A session.
He promised to serve for only one term and deliver more visible results than the current leadership has achieved in the last five years: to open up the land market, to remove oligarchic influence over business and politics in the country, and to fight corruption.
“Corruption starts from the top of the pyramid: the presidential administration, the government, the security services, and the prosecutor’s office (all agencies under president’s direct control). We don’t need to wait for another five years,” Grytsenko said.
Speaking about his economic policies, he emphasized the importance of developing manufacturing, agricultural processing, and technology. He said he was against monopolies, including state ones. He promised that under his presidency, the State Anti-Monopoly Agency will be more powerful than the prosecutor’s office, and the government’s role in all sectors would diminish. That includes the banking sector, which is over 50 percent state-owned.
“The state shouldn’t be a monster that controls everything,” Grytsenko said.
But what worried investors about Grytsenko’s unlikely presidency was his plan to intervene in the work of the National Bank of Ukraine, one of few politically independent institutions in the country.
He announced his own candidate for the head of the NBU, professor Oleksandr Savchenko, who “will be able to deliver stability to the bank system, clean up corruption at the NBU and the banks, and protect the rights of creditors.”
Tomas Fiala of Dragon Capital disagreed, saying that “investors prefer the NBU to remain independent.”
Third-time presidential candidate Grytsenko, who cultivates the image of an honest politician, is currently being investigated by the Prosecutor General’s Office for his work as defense minister in 2005-2007. Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has claimed that during Grytsenko’s tenure, Ukraine sold off most of its military equipment and weapons, which contributed to the “destruction of the military capacity of Ukraine.”
Grytsenko retorted that Lutsenko was “President Poroshenko’s man,” and was not telling the truth.
