Ukrainians Vote; Little Changes

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 13, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

Cash-strapped Ukraine faces daunting problems in its attempt to transform its society and troubled economy, but Ukrainians do not yearn for a return to communism.

Ukraine's incumbent president, Leonid Kuchma, sure knows how to run an election. His crushing reelection victory on Nov. 14 against Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko went smoothly according to his plan -- and, overlooking some excesses here and there, it could serve as a model for any beleaguered head of state in the former Warsaw bloc facing a ballot challenge from those who seek to turn the clock back to the Soviet era.

Not that Kuchma, a former missile-factory director, didn't have a useful electoral blueprint at hand when plotting his strategy. Compare the Ukrainian's campaign with Boris Yeltsin's in 1996, when the Russian leader managed to fight off a strong Communist bid to secure the Kremlin, and the parallels are apparent.

From the get-go, and even when there initially was an overcrowded field of 15 presidential candidates, the wily Kuchma sought to craft this election as a simple choice between communism and anticommunism. Kuchma never lost an opportunity to paint himself as the candidate most likely to push the former Soviet republic toward economic reforms and Symonenko as the heir to Josef Stalin. "Some continue to regard the events that transpired on Nov. 7, 1917, as the dawn of a new era," the president thundered in a nationally televised address on Revolution Day, renamed this year by Kuchma as the Day of National Reconciliation. "Others view those events as a coup which started the reign of dictatorship and violence and a cruel experiment on entire peoples. The past should serve as a warning against repeating tragic mistakes. Ukraine has no future in the past." And the incumbent also contrasted his tilt to the West with the Communists' talk of reunification with Russia and Belarus.

Kuchma did much to boost Symonenko's standing in the early days of the race by publicly earmarking him as the real threat even when the uncharismatic Communist trailed in third place on the first presidential ballot Oct. 31. Once the other contenders had fallen by the wayside, Kuchma then copied Yeltsin's campaign in the runoff election -- using pop singers and sports stars on the hustings and broadcasting lurid TV commercials warning of the possible dire gulag-type consequences of a Communist return to power. Like Yeltsin, Kuchma wielded all his powers to control the electronic media, turning them into a servile arm of his campaign. And to top it off, in exactly the same way as the Russian managed to supercharge his 1996 campaign in the final days by co-opting then-election rival Gen. Alexander Lebed, Kuchma appointed as national security chief Yevhen Marchuk, a former prime minister who ran against him on the first ballot.

No wonder Symonenko was left fuming that there is no democracy in Ukraine. As the poll results came in, giving Kuchma about 56 percent of the vote and his opponent 38 percent, the Communist insisted: "If we had objective elections, I am sure that we would have won." Admittedly, Kuchma's tactics were not pretty. Mudslinging was the least of it. The first ballot was marred by violence, forged election literature and, in the words of the staid English-language Kyiv Post, other questionable antics. In Kuchma's defense, supporters insist that this election was no time to be squeamish -- the barbarians were back knocking at the gate, they say -- and they argue the president didn't seek to ban opposition newspapers, though they acknowledge he may have overstepped his legal authority by using state institutions to further his candidacy.

They have a point -- a Communist win would have been a disaster for Ukraine. For all of his promises to allow a market economy to function, Symonenko's appeal was a nostalgic one, and the 47-year-old's policies would have returned the country to the kind of command economy it desperately is trying to shed. Privatization would have been stopped dead by the Communists, and the banks would have had to kowtow to the government.

Kuchma, though, can count himself lucky. Centrist politicians and opposition parties played into his hands by failing to form a united anticorruption front. So his election victory wasn't an endorsement of his first term, and Kuchma remains unpopular in a country of 50 million people that is beset by the same kind of troubles that plague the Russian Federation. So the candidates, even the most impassioned Kuchma advocates, made no bones about why they would vote for the incumbent: For them this election was about defeating communism once again and at least preserving the chance of a better economic tomorrow.

"Ukraine now is not perfect, but it is better than it was," says bespectacled economics student Tanya Plamodyel in front of the golden arches of McDonald's. "I was a little girl when communism ended but I remember my parents were very poor back then -- they worked at a plant. Now they are not rich but they run a small business and they have enough. We are arguing here that Communists are terrible people and we don't want them back. If the Communists are elected, people will be poorer and everyone will be afraid to say what they think. By comparison, Kuchma is the best." Interpreter Lesya Kritskaya, a 38-year-old mother of two, agrees, saying, "Our choice is awful -- it is between the bad and the even worse. We have no alternative to Kuchma."