Our Ukraine, a coalition comprised of Popular Rukh of Ukraine, Ukrainian People’s Rukh, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists and some other patriotic groups, turned out to be the winner of the election race. Though Our Ukraine’s voiced priorities include increasing pensions, reforming the law enforcement and judiciary system, their program is rather declarative on the whole. But voters seemed not to go into the heart of their program, it was not for Our Ukraine’s platform but for the coalition’s charismatic leader Viktor Yuschenko did they cast their votes.
Yuschenko has lately became very popular among common people. In the 1990s, Yuschenko, who then headed the National Bank of Ukraine, kicked off a painless financial reform, exchanging money coupons for the national currency, hryvna. In 1999-2001 Yuschenko was prime minister of Ukraine. During his time in office he managed to pay off pension arrears. Unlike his predecessors who had helped loot the country and sought huge million-worth credits from abroad, Yuschenko not only paid off pension arrears and forbade any electricity cutoffs throughout Ukraine but did not borrow a single cent from abroad. He also managed to give back to foreign loaners over $2 billion ahead of schedule. In the early 2000s, Yuschenko was named by Global Finance one of the six best bankers of the world.
The United States is said to count on Uschenko. The United States is quite outright that it wants to see him in the Ukrainian presidential seat. Yuschenko’s wife, Yekaterina Chumachenko, who had been long living in emigration, has become a US citizen. Yuschenko’s dismissal from the prime-ministerial post had at that time generated a negative response in political and business circles in the United States.
The Communist Party of Ukraine has come second. On the eve of the elections Communist leader Petr Simonenko met with the Patriarch of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Alexy II, receiving his blessing for the struggle for the triumph of Marxism-Leninism. Simonenko had talks with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. The communist leader stands up for closer ties between Ukraine and Russia and urges Patriarch Filaret (formerly known as Denisenko), the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kievan Patriarchate, to return property and churches to the Moscow Patriarchate. Simonenko calls for giving the Russian language the status of a state language. At public meetings the Communist leader is always spotting pictures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and is heaping praises on the era of Bolshevik terror.
The Communist Party has secured its place in the new parliament due to those who are still yearning for the return of Soviet-era low prices for the sausages and state care. The ideology of the workers’ and peasants’ dictatorship is still very prominent in the party. Ukraine’s prosecutor general Mikhail Potebenko, poet Boris Oleinik, soccer player Oleg Blokhin, voted the best European soccer player in 1975, and former speaker of the Crimean parliament Leonid Grach will now represent the Communist Party in the parliament.
Among the three winners is also the Ukraine’s main pro-presidential bloc, For United Ukraine. The bloc includes, the Party of the Regions, People’s Democratic Party, Agrarian Party, Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Labor Ukraine Party and the entire administrative resources of Ukraine’s president Leonid Kuchma. The parties are respectively chaired by Ukraine’s prime minister Anatoly Kinakh, chairman of the Ukrainian tax administration Nikolai Azarov, former prime minister of Ukraine Valery Pustovoitenko and the like. For United Ukraine is led by Vladimir Lytvyn, head of the presidential administration. The bloc is bound to form an obedient-to-president majority in the parliament. Taking into account that in the multi-mandate electoral districts the biggest number of ballots were put in for For United Ukraine, their faction in the new Verkhovna Rada is expected to dominate in the parliament, at least by numbers.
The Socialist Party of Ukraine, led by Aleksander Moroz, has come fourth. The party is in tough opposition to the current Ukrainian president and his government. In November 2000, Moroz released to the parliament secret recordings made by State Security Major Nikolai Melnichenko in president Kuchma’s office. The Socialist Party of Ukraine demands Kuchma’s resignation and seeks impartial investigation of the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
In recent years the party has, in fact, grown into a nationalist-communist structure, where nationalist-patriotic ideas live side by side with Communist rhetoric and cult of Bolshevik leaders. Yulia Tymoshenko’s Bloc was fifth. Under her wing are the following parties: Sobor (Council), Batkivschina (Fatherland), Ukrainian Republican Party, Independent Trade Unions of Miners. The bloc’s most distinguished personalities are former political prisoners Levko Lukyanenko, Stepan Khmara, and trained Cheka man Grigory Omelchenko, who is the leader of the Anti-Mafia group. As for Yulia Tymoshenko, her opponents were calling her a “thief” during the pre-election campaign. Ukrainian prosecutors formally indicted former deputy prime minister Tymoshenko on charges of great larceny, tax evasion, and bribe-giving to former prime minister Pavel Lazarenko, who is being jailed in San-Francisco, USA, on a charge of international corruption. In spite of all this, the embattled minister Tymoshenko is held in respect by human rights groups who oppose Kuchma’s regime and view Tymoshenko as their ally.
The Social Democratic Party of Ukraine has come sixth in the elections. Social Democrats’ leaflets urged voters to back the so called European option. Party’s chairman Viktor Medvedchuk held that ideas of socialist democracy have swept the entire Europe and now it’s Ukrainian turn to adopt these ideas. However, the Socintern international movement (known under acronym SIFAC) does not accept Ukrainian Social Democrats into its fold, saying that there are too many oligarchs in the Ukrainian party. The leader of those oligarchs, Medvedchuk, was engaged in the 1979 persecution of dissident poet Vasily Stus, who later on died at one of the Perm political camps. Among the party’s functionaries are owner of the Inter television company Aleksander Zinchenko, owner of the Dinamo soccer club Grigory Surkis, and former Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk.
The Progressive Socialist Party, led by Nataliya Vitrenko, failed to have overcome the 4% barrier. The Green Party also was left overboard though sociologists intended it for one of the top places. Women for the Future, the party which ranks president’s wife Lyudmila Kuchma among its founders, won’t sit in the new parliament as well. The Liberal Party, Yabloko, also suffered defeat in spite of the fact that on March 28, it ceremoniously admitted brown bear Stefan to the party ranks, declaring the mascot to be their best canvasser.