The Surprise in Ukraine’s Coming Elections
Street workers remove an election poster in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday, Oct. 24, the last official day of political campaigning ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections.
Associated Press
Ukraine elects a much-needed new parliament on Sunday, and I’ve been worried about a “Zhirinovsky shock.” Maybe you remember what happened in the Russian parliamentary elections of 1993? Economic distress, political disorder, and countrywide psychological disorientation produced a big vote for nationalist loonies, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s facetiously named Liberal Democrats.
Today, Ukraine has the same crazy-making ingredients, maybe worse: war and national dismemberment, economic free-fall, anti-establishment anger, fear of abandonment by the West. With things this bad, one expects half-unhinged candidates and parties to get the upper hand.
So far, amazingly, they haven’t. Recent polls show President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc likely to get 30% or so of the vote for party lists. (Half of the new Rada, or parliament, will be elected proportionally; the rest will be chosen in single-member districts.) Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front may get around 11%, and it’s possible that together he and President Poroshenko will command a majority of seats.
On both the left and right, parties hoping to collect protest votes are being disappointed. This could be the first election anywhere in the former Soviet Union in which the Communist Party falls below the 5% minimum required to win a bloc of seats. Russian spokesmen have spent months screaming about the “fascist” nature of two Ukrainian parties, Freedom and Right Sector, that were prominent in last winter’s big demonstrations in Kyiv. Both of these seem likely to get less than 5% too.
One nationalist group has been doing well: the Radical Party of Oleg Lyashko, famous for a string of fistfights in his parliamentary service to date. If his vote surges on Sunday, he’ll be touted as a new Zhirinovsky. Yet, in contrast to 1993, the broader message of this election isn’t that nationalists can take advantage of democracy. It’s that democrats are taking advantage of nationalism. Mr. Yatsenyuk in particular has won voter enthusiasm by filling his party list with soldiers fighting on Ukraine’s eastern front. His billboards feature grizzled, handsome guys in fatigues (not the dweeby prime minister himself). Their message is a sober one: national sacrifice plus national reform, not blood-curdling rhetoric and unattainable promises.
This isn’t a dog-that-didn’t-bark story, not least because it may yet do so. Ukraine is in a very bad way. But it is handling its plight like a grown-up country. The U.S. and Europe should remember that when they’re asked to help.
Stephen Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of “Maximalist: America in the World From Truman to Obama.” He is on Twitter: @ssestanovich.
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