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JOHN  MARONE, KYIV
THE RE-ELECTION ELECTION CAMPAIGN

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On March 26, the campaign for early mayoral elections kicks off in Kyiv. Current mayor Leonid Chernovetsky was elected to office exactly two years to the day in 2006, but his political opponents believe that he's already overstayed his welcome.

So on March 18 they put together a parliamentary majority to approve early elections for May 25.

It doesn’t matter that after two fiercely fought presidential elections and two equally contentious parliamentary ones within a span of less than three years the Ukrainian people are campaign weary.

Nor does anyone seem overly concerned about the expense: the last mayoral poll cost the state over $2 million. This year’s re-election is expected to be much more costly.

At stake is control over the nation’s most populous and important city, with its lucrative plots of land still held by the municipal authorities.

Members of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s BYuT bloc have been accusing Chernovetsky for months of handing out city land on the sly to his cronies and supporters.

Even before parliament voted to make Chernovetsky re-apply to voters for his job, the tide was turning against him.

On March 13, the mayor was suspended as head of the city administration (a title he shares along with that of mayor) for 15 days.

The suspension order was signed by President Yushchenko under pressure from his nominal Orange allies in BYuT.

In addition, an ad-hoc parliamentary commission headed by outspoken BYuT MP Mykola Tomenko was set up to investigate impropriety on the part of Chernovetsky, and it will continue to operate during the election campaign.

The war of attrition between Tymoshenko and Chernovetsky actually goes back even earlier, when for example last summer BYuT tried to withdraw its party members from the city council.

This same tactic was used by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko in the parliament to force Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych to accept snap elections. In the end, the Orange leaders got their way, and Tymoshenko replaced the Donetsk strongman as head of government.

The unity of Orange allies is not so certain, however, this time around.

Members of Tymoshenko’s bloc have openly accused the president’s team of secretly supporting Chernovetsky’s bid to stay in office.

For example, according to current election legislation, the mayor is elected without a run-off. This favored Chernovetsky in the 2006 mayoral elections, handing him an outright victory with less than 32 percent of the vote.

BYuT is trying to get this rule changed but says the president is blocking their efforts through his ally, parliamentary speaker Arseny Yatseniuk.

Despite their common struggle during the Orange Revolution and guise of unity during the last parliamentary elections, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko are widely believed to be fierce competitors for the presidency in 2009.

But for now, the femme fatale of Ukrainian politics is concentrating on securing the mayor’s office.

A seasoned if eccentric politician, Chernovetsky remains defiant.

“Despite the fact that the decision to hold early elections in the capital was an exclusively political one and has no basis in law, I will take part in these elections,” he told a press conference on March 18.

In response to Tymoshenko’s multilateral assaults, Chernovetsky has gone on the offensive, accusing his political enemy of trying to destabilize the city with a recent strike by bus drivers.

Chernovetsky, a former lawmaker who has faced controversy in the past ranging from an automobile-related manslaughter charge to his support of an evangelical church headed by a controversial African minister, has now refused to step down from his job during the election campaign.

Moreover, he has pledged to continue to pursue the populist policies and personal largess that helped him to get into office in the first place.

During the 2006 campaign, Chernovetsky sent out care packages of free food and household items to the capital’s pensioners.

“We will further increase the budget and social payments – such is my will. We will build new Metro stations, repair old roads and do everything possible to improve the lives of the people of Kyiv,” he said.

In addition to his generosity, Chernovetsky was able to take the capital away from long-standing mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko due to division among his opponents.

Omelchenko got only 21.2 percent of the vote in 2006 partly because his former protégé’, heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitchko, took another 23.7 percent.

Klitchko, currently a Kyiv city councilman, already announced his candidacy in the snap elections on March 19.

Aware of the reasons for the failure of his first bid, the retired boxer is now calling for unity among Orange politicians.

“If a large number of candidates is again put forward, they will split the vote between themselves and, in the end, we could end up with a situation like we had during the elections two years ago, when two strong candidates met, but a third whose victory was not expected took the race,” Klitchko said during a recent television interview.

According to one poll, Klitchko enjoys just over 25 percent of voter support and Chernovetsky is right behind him with just under 25 percent. All other potential candidates have no more than 10 percent.

Omelchenko has said that he won’t run again, but another Orange candidate has appeared on the horizon instead.

Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko, who heads the People’s Self Defense Party of the nominally pro-presidential Our Ukraine-People’s Self Defense bloc in parliament.

Lutsenko, considered closer to Tymoshenko than to Yushchenko, has even worse relations with Chernovetsky than the premier.

Earlier this year, the nation’s top cop was accused of striking Chernovetsky in an official setting.

“I won’t deny that I have had and continue to have ambitions to head the capital of Ukraine,” he told a national television audience on Sunday.

But like Klitchko, Lutsenko said he would only run for mayor if the parties behind the current Orange coalition were united behind him – meaning presumably that he won’t run against Klitchko.

“I am not in the habit of parading my ambitions on my own and am not about to change,” he said.

BYuT’s Tomenko said his bloc, the Klitchko team and People's Self Defense are the only ones who have a right to field a single Orange candidate.

In keeping with the increasingly hostile tone between BYuT and the president, Tomenko ruled out a candidate from Our Ukraine.

“There is something called political responsibility and it should be recalled who has been doing what for the past two years. If the Kyiv faction of Our Ukraine [in the Kyiv City Council] has voted with its last breathe and drop of blood for Chernovetsky and allocation [of city land plots], then I cannot understand their keen interest in fighting against Chernovetsky for the mayor’s seat,” he said on Monday.

Whoever runs against Chernovetsky, it seems clear that Tymoshenko’s attempt to remove him from office in Ukraine’s latest repeat election is part of her larger campaign toward the presidency, in which control over Kyiv’s lucrative building sites is no less important as an incentive to campaign allies.

John Marone, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, Kyiv, Ukraine

March 24, 2008



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