Ukraine: Election confirms right-wing government and its austerity and war aims
Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine, with the new modernised main battle tank T-72B for the Ukrainian National Guard.
More on the political situation in Ukraine.
By Roger
Annis
November 11, 2014 – A version of this
first appeared at Truthout, submitted
to Links International Journal of Socialist
Renewal by the author — The general election to Ukraine’s parliament (the Verkhovna Rada, or Supreme Council) on
October 26 was another step by the country’s wealthy power brokers to consolidate
their pro-Europe, pro-austerity economic course and related war against the
rebellious population in the east of the country. A large, neo-conservative and
far-right majority now controls the Rada.
The election outcome continues the
political course begun last February with the overthrow of President Victor
Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. That course was affirmed in the May presidential
election that saw Petro Poroshenko win a solid electoral majority from the
minority of Ukrainians who took part.
This latest election comes three years
earlier than the traditional, five-year cycle of Rada elections. The gambit by Poroshenko
in convening the early vote succeeded admirably, but low voter participation as
well as the course of events since February show that Ukraine is very far from
achieving political stability, and there are no indications that the country’s
calamitous economic situation will improve.
Most ominous of all are the signs that Kyiv is turning its
back on its September 5 ceasefire agreement with pro-autonomy rebel forces in
eastern Ukraine.
Neo-conservatives and far right win the election
The electoral machines[1] of Poroshenko
and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk topped the Rada election with similar results—3.4
million and 3.5 million votes, respectively (each 22 per cent).[2] The “Petro
Poroshenko Bloc” won 132 seats in the Rada, while Yatsenyuk’s “Peoples Front”
won 82. That’s short of a majority in the 450-seat Rada, but not to worry — a
large majority of the newly elected deputies share the program of the two
leading blocs.
Yatsenyuk’s electoral machine includes
Rada speaker Oleksandr Turchynov and interior (police) minister Arsen Avakov.
They represent a more openly pro-Western wing of the ruling class.
The third-place finisher was another,
new electoral bloc, Samopomich (Self Reliance). It won 1.7 million votes (11
per cent) and 34 seats. It is headed by the strongly pro-Europe mayor of the
city of Lviv in the west of Ukraine, Andrii Sadovyi. Sadovyi’s Lviv is a
stronghold of the extreme right.
Another Samopomich leader newly elected
to the Rada is Semen Semenchevo. He is a commander of the Donbas Battalion, one
of the dozen or so rightist and fascist paramilitary battalions that have
sprung up this year to fight alongside the conscript Ukraine army in the east
of the country.
The right-wing Radical Party of Oleg
Lyashko, also a paramilitary commander, gained 1.7 million votes and 22 seats.
Lyashko was condemned
by Amnesty International in a report several months ago for kidnapping and
brutalising leading supporters of political autonomy in eastern Ukraine (so-called
“separatists”). His campaign posters featured him impaling
a caricatured Jewish oligarch on a Ukrainian trident.
The Fatherland Party of former prime minister
Yulia Tymoshenko suffered a large setback, receiving only 6 per cent of the
vote. She came a distant second in the presidential election last May with a
campaign calling for total war against the “separatists”.[3] In March she was
caught on a telephone recording musing about using nuclear weapons against the
rebel east.
Gone from the Rada is the only party
that was speaking out against the war in the east, the Communist Party. It
failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold to win party seats.[4]
The “Opposition Bloc” won close to 1.5
million votes and 34 seats in the east and south of Ukraine. It is a coalition
of small parties, including a rump of the shattered, former governing Party of
Regions. The electoral alliance advocated dialogue to quell the war in the east.
It is the only party in the new Rada supporting a continuation of Ukraine’s
constitutional clause prohibiting the country from joining any military
alliance, including NATO.
There were 29 parties or blocs running in the election. The
media project VoxUkraine summarised the choices before the electorate in an analysis
published on October 20, saying, “Despite the fact that [the nine largest parties]
are political rivals, their programs are very similar. The main common feature
of the party programs is the absence of ideology. Hence, they try to appeal to as
many people as possible instead of promoting programmatic principles.”
Electoral setback for the far right?
Much has been written about the
seemingly poor electoral outcomes of two of the largest extreme-right parties, Svoboda
and Right Sector. Both failed to reach 5 per cent. Svoboda received 742,000
votes (4.7 per cent, compared to 10.4 per cent in 2012), while Right Sector received
250,000. But the numbers alone understate the situation with the extreme right.
Svoboda elected at least six
candidates. Party distinctions were blurred by a field crowded with
neo-conservative and extreme-right candidacies and by cooperation agreements
between the parties. Thus, a leader of the fascist Social-National Assembly, Andriy
Biletsky (an Azov Battalion commander), won direct election as an “independent”
when no candidate of the Poroshenko or Yatsenyuk blocs ran in his district in
Kyiv. Some extreme rightists ran as candidates of the two large blocs.
Yatsenyuk’s bloc stood aside in the
district in Dnipropetrovsk
where Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh won.
Two other Right Sector candidates were elected in the city, Ukraine’s
fourth-largest.
Another sign of far-right influence are
postings to police and military positions. Since the election, Vadim Troyan of
the Social-National Assembly has been appointed to head Kyiv’s police force, while
Yuri Mykhalchyshyn of Svoboda has been appointed to head the propaganda and
analysis section of the Ukraine Security Service (SBU).[5]
Ukrainian writer Dmitry Kolesnik, editor
of the left-wing web Liva.com, has
written an analysis of the election titled, “Quasi-parliament
for the minority”. He explains:
The whole election campaign was held in the atmosphere of
intimidation and terror of political opponents, reminding one of the election
in Germany 1933 – “free and fair” despite permanent attacks and terror against
the left, trade-unions and dissenters.
His article details the litany of
attacks by the far right in recent months on civil rights and political parties.
He describes the violent campaign
waged by the far right against government officials and politicians who are not
even left wing.
Resembling lynching brigades, radical, right-wing
gangs have taken to attacking elected officials in Ukraine by throwing them into
trash bins, reports RT news. The most dangerous trend of all [in the Rada election] is that
mainstream, “respectable” parties have adopted ultra-nationalist rhetoric and
agendas while introducing neo-Nazis in their ranks and promoting them to the
highest positions.
Since the
article, a court in the city of Odessa has banned rallies that were planned on November
7 to mark the birth date of anarchist hero Nestor Makhno and the 97th
anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Elsewhere in Ukraine, rallies marking
the Russian Revolution were attacked.
Weak support for government course
The Rada election has revealed deep
unease if not opposition to the political and economic course of the ruling
elite. Voter turnout was the lowest in the history of independent Ukraine, 15.8
million. That’s below the previous election low: 16 million in the May 2014
presidential election. By contrast, 29.1 million and 23.2 million voters cast
ballots, respectively, in the presidential election of 2004 and the Rada
election of 2007.
The turnout was especially low in eastern regions, where
opposition to the civil war and the turn to austerity Europe are highest. In
the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
(provinces) under Ukraine government control, turnout was 32 and 33 per cent,
respectively. Turnout was low across the oblasts of eastern and southern
Ukraine, including Odessa (39 per cent), Kherson (41 per cent), Mykolaiv (Nikolaev)
(42 per cent) and Kharkov (45 per cent).
In Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts, Poroshenko’s bloc won
19 per cent. The Opposition Bloc topped the polls in Dnipropetrovsk with 24 per
cent.
The city of Slavyansk in Donetsk oblast is under military
occupation. Voter turnout was 31 per cent, with 35 per cent voting for the
Opposition Bloc and 13 per cent for the Communist Party. The combined vote of the
Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk blocs was 24 per cent.
The Sea of Azov port city of Mariupol in Donetsk is located
close to the de facto ceasefire line
declared on September 5. It has been spared the worst of fighting elsewhere in
the region. Here, voter turnout was 30 per cent. The Opposition Bloc won 61 per
cent while Poroshenko/Yatsenyuk received only 13 per cent.
NATO governments welcome the results
US President Barack Obama and leaders
of other NATO member countries hailed the election result and pledged continued
military and economic support to the Poroshenko-led neo-conservative government.
Obama issued a statement saying, “Yesterday’s parliamentary vote represents
another important milestone in Ukraine’s democratic development. We look
forward to the convening of the new parliament and the quick formation of a
strong, inclusive government.”
The word “Ukraine” in the NATO countries’
welcoming pronouncements could easily be exchanged with the names of other
countries where imperialist-backed electoral exercises have obtained similar “positive”
results for the big powers.
In Haiti, for example, a two-round,
presidential election in November 2010/March 2011 achieved a new president entirely
subservient to the big powers and their plans for continued dominance in the
country shattered by the January 2010 earthquake. That election was entirely
financed from abroad and it featured the lowest voter turnout in the history of
the Western Hemisphere.
“Elections” in Iraq and Afghanistan in
the past 10 years have produced a succession of weak and servile governments,
one result of which has been the disastrous rise of the right-wing, ISIS
movement in Iraq and Syria.
As the election exercise was playing out, NATO countries were
preparing the latest in a series of military exercises in eastern Europe aimed
at intimidating the rebel movement in eastern Ukraine and its supporters in
Russia and elsewhere. A two-week
exercise began in Lithuania, which borders Ukraine, on November 2. It
involves nine NATO-member countries, including the US, Britain and Canada.
Austerity
Russia is facing considerable economic
difficulty as a result of sanctions by the West and the steep drop in world oil
prices. But Ukraine’s situation is much worse. The election took place amid an accelerating
economic decline.
In 2013, there was no growth in GDP.
This year, it has shrunk by 1.1 per cent in the first quarter, 4.7 per cent
in the second, and 5.1 per cent in the third. GDP in 2013 has
still not recovered from the time of the 2008 financial collapse.
Ukraine’s currency is the worst
performing in the world this year, losing some 60 per cent of its value. Foreign
currency reserves are nearly spent.
The draft
program of the new governing coalition spells out drastic measures against
ordinary Ukrainians, including changes to the Labor Code that further restrict
workers’ rights, adopting the right to fire workers without trade union
approval, lifting a moratorium on closures of hospitals and health clinics,
privatisation of coal mines and railroads and rejecting price controls on
essential foodstuffs.
The government is proceeding with a purging (“lustration”)
of its civil service, stripping the jobs of as many as 1 million people who
served under the previous government. The special law approved in mid-September
has been termed a “legalised witch-hunt” and has been condemned by Ukraine’s prosecutor general and by Human Rights Watch.
The September 5 ceasefire agreement was very unfavourable to
the pro-autonomy forces because it left Ukrainian forces occupying about half
the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Now Kyiv is routinely violating
its terms. Last week saw some of the worst shelling of the city of Donetsk by
Ukraine armed forces since the agreement was signed. One particularly horrific
violation was the shelling of a
school on November 5 that killed two teenage students and wounded four
others.
Poroshenko is recommending
to the new Rada that autonomy provisions he had announced in September for
Donetsk and Luhansk regions be cancelled. The announcement and his government’s
stepped-up military moves are a bellicose response to the holding of elections
by the rebel political leadership in the two regions on November 2. Voter
participation was high. The fact that Poroshenko’s autonomy promise could be so
easily cancelled shows how little it was worth in the first place.
Kyiv’s turn to austerity Europe has already seen sharp cuts
to health care and other social spending. The price of essentials such as food
and home heating are rising sharply. Coincidentally, tens of thousands of
workers demonstrated
in Brussels on November 6 against Belgian government policies that will
raise the pension age, freeze wages and cut into public services.
Ongoing military exercises by NATO in eastern Europe, continued economic
sanctions by the West against Russia and an emboldened, neo-conservative
government in power in Kyiv make a very dangerous combination.
A broad, solidarity movement is needed
internationally to press for an end to the war in eastern Ukraine and the
economic sanctions targeting Russia. These steps could lead to the
self-determination (“federalisation”) measures that are needed in Ukraine to
pull the country back from the abyss.
Notes
[1] It is much too generous to refer to
the Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk electoral machines as “parties”.
[2] The election figures are those of the Central
Electoral Commission of Ukraine.
[3] The term “separatist” is used in
Western propaganda outlets to denigrate pro-independence movements they
dislike, such as in Quebec and now in the Donbas region of south-east Ukraine.
By contrast, independence movements in Scotland and Catalonia receive favourable
terminology. Thus, in reporting the unofficial referendum vote on independence
from Spain just conducted in Catalonia, the chosen terms for the Catalan
movement are “pro-independence groups” (The
Guardian), “pro-independence organizations” (Reuters, in the Globe and Mail), “pro-independence
supporters” on a “push for independence” (Associated Press, in Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News online) and a “secessionist cause”
conducting an “independence vote” (New
York Times).
[4] Ukraine’s electoral process
designates roughly half the seats in the Rada to candidates who win direct
election. The other half is apportioned to parties that gain a minimum of 5 per
cent of the country-wide vote.
[5] Yuri Mykhalchyshyn, 31, is a deputy leader of Svoboda. He was elected to
the Rada in 2012.
[Roger Annis writes frequently for Truthout on events in Ukraine. He is an
editor of the new website, The New
Cold War: Ukraine and beyond.]