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TWO INTRIGUES OF UKRAINE'S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
DMITRY VYDRIN,
Professor of Political Science, Kyiv
The presidential election campaign in Ukraine has two main intrigues, if anything extraordinary does not happen in the New Year and Christmas holidays. The first one is a very wide gap between approval ratings of the leaders of the presidential race, Viktor Yanukovych and Yuliya Tymoshenko. When the campaign started, many people said that in the first round Viktor Yanukovych would take 2-5% votes more than Yuliya Tymoshenko would. But according to the recent public opinion polls, the gap has become twice as wide as it was, and now it is about 10%.
Why did this occur? The main reason is a failure of the Cabinet’s budget policy. Ms Tymoshenko hoped to take foreign credits from, in the main, the International Monetary Fund for a year. The IMF divided the credit up into four tranches. It has issued three tranches, but all of them, in spite of the original agreements, were used for social spending, in other words, “to bribe the voters”. The IMF turned a blind eye to that, but it did not give the fourth tranche suspecting the government not only of spending the money on the social payments but also of corruption.
Now Yuliya Tymoshenko can indemnify for the budget neither through the domestic incomes nor through the credits. Like in corrida, the moment of truth came, the viewers, the bull and the toreador understand everything. In the case of Yuliya Tymoshenko, the situation is understandable to the political elite, international organizations and Ukraine’s people.
For the first time, there are no Christmas trees in many towns and villages, and the people have too little money to give presents to their children. This did not happen in Ukraine even in hard times. Earlier the government was not ready to fight against the flu, even gauze face-bandages and the cheapest drugs were not sold in the drugstores.
Given the current situation, it is unclear how Yuliya Tymoshenko is going to bridge the gap between herself and Viktor Yanukovych. She has only three weeks (as a matter of fact, only one week because of the holidays) to do that. So, I believe that in the main she will dig up the dirt on her rival even if the dirt is not true at all.
At the beginning of the campaign everybody was sure that Arseniy Yatsenuk would rank third, which would allow him to claim to become Prime Minister. And the second intrigue is that today Serhyi Tigipko ranks third, which I am glad to hear. Probably I am the only person who said that this presidential candidate was very up-and-coming politician. Then his approval rating was about 2% and has reached 9% by now. Serhyi Tigipko has created a good basis to fill a high position after the elections, or to take part in early parliamentary elections with forming his own faction.
Why did Serhyi Tigipko come to rank third? The Ukrainian people do not trust the authorities. Only 3% of the population trust the Parliament. Many presidential candidates are the MPs including Arseniy Yatsenuk. For the recent five years Serhyi Tigipko has been neither MP nor held any high posts. Unlike the other second echelon candidates he is not associated with the current authorities, who have discredited themselves.
December 25, 2009
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Our readers’ comments
| UkrToday |
30.12.2009 15:45 |
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The gap between second and third is the most important. Ukraine unfortunately does not have a single round preferential ...
The gap between second and third is the most important. Ukraine unfortunately does not have a single round preferential voting system. A preferential voting system would certainly be more democratic and cost half as much. Results known in days as opposed to weeks What is significant is that the gap between second and third is more then 9% with only 17 days before the first round election day. 16 Candidates will lose their 2.5 million deposit (A total of 4o million) Yushchenko who is on less then 4% support and has a negative rating of 83% will lose in the first round of voting. There are four candidates who are members of Our Ukraine and all are running against Yushchenko with each one competing for their share of the same slice of cheese. A gap of 9%very much is not easy to bridge I would doubt that Tigipko can out poll Tymoshenko. There is serious ongoing concern that Yushchenko may not wish to give up office so readily.He has made some extrofdinry claims that he will win the election. I fail to see how he could do such without rigging the election itself. With an estimated campaign cost of one billion dollars one has to ask to what value. Ukraine would have been much better off if Parliamentary constitutional majority elected its head of state as is the case in Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Switzerland, Greece and even the EU.
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