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Valeriy Konovalyuk, one of
the prominent members of the Party of Regions, is now campaigning in
constituency 60 in Donetsk Oblast. Despite being a party member, he runs as a
self-nominated candidate and is competing with Oleksandr Ryzhenkov, director of
local steel mill, who is heavily promoted by the party.

Rivalry in the party is the
cause of this competition. “What happened to me is a usual working
relationship,” Konovalyuk says with caution, which is typical for people who
compete with the Regions but do not want to burn bridges.

Viktor Pinchuk, one of
Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, is another example of both rivalry with the
Regions, and caution. After playing along with the Regions for years, he has now
nominated his flagship pipe plant’s top manager to run against a powerful Party
of Regions candidate in a majority constituency in Dnipropetrovsk. Pinchuk
himself has been a deputy from that constituency twice.

He is now
calling for his former voters to support his candidate in the majority race,
but vote for the Party of Regions in the proportional vote, which fills half
the parliament. His TV channels are also presenting more balanced election
coverage than UT-1, Inter and 1+1 TV channel, according to monitoring by Equal
Opportunities watchdog.

The process
of composing the party list for the Regions also showed the rise of some
groups, while others got sidelined.

Read more
about the Party of Regions list of candidates here.

Olena
Bondarenko one of the party’s prominent speakers and number 47 on the list,
says the list was composed by Andriy Kliuyev, secretary of the National
Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, who runs the election headquarters,
based on consultations with President Viktor Yanukovych.

She says
candidates are chosen on the basis of their usefulness for the party in
parliament. The core team, she says, includes lawyers and potential authors of
legislation. Then, there are “the talking heads” able to present the party’s
point of view in the Rada and the media.

Party
sponsors are another category. “People who have been party’s financiers for a
long time, who have allowed it to live, exist and support a full-time staff,”
she explains.

Then, there
are people who “can be useful in case of destructive actions of the
opposition,” she says.

The fact that
Klyuev was in charge of composing the list has triggered lots of speculation
about who is in favor and who is out of favor.

Few people are
on the party list who are tied to another powerful grouping in the Regions –
presidential chief of staff Serhiy Lyovochkin and First Deputy Prime Minister
Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy. This is interpreted as a weakening of this group as
“The Family” – loyalists close to Yanukovych – gain more power.  The president’s older son, Oleksandr
Yanukovych and his friend, National Bank governor Serhiy Arbuzov, are
considered to be the leaders of “The Family.”

Taras
Berezovets, a political consultant, estimated
that the Party of Regions has spent $200 million on its campaign. The
campaign is clearly well-organized and visible in all regions. Journalists from
Ukrainska Pravda news website published campaign plans, complete with slogans
and breakdown of actions, long before its official start in July.

Volodymyr
Rybak, a prominent party member and No. 10 on the proportional ticket, said the
party has no money troubles. “We have enough wealthy people. So there are no
problems with financing the party,”  Rybak told the Kyiv Post.

The party’s
private finances appear to be bolstered also by government spending – or at
least promises of public spending.

Oleksiy
Azarov, the 41-year-old son of Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, is
running for parliament in a single-mandate district in eastern Ukraine,
promised to solve the longstanding regional water supply problem by getting a
government subsidy for it.

This is far
from an isolated case.

The Party
of Regions advertising billboards are portraying budget-sponsored projects,
such as construction of airports and a successful Euro 2012 tournament last
summer, as the party’s achievements. Prime Minister Mykola Azarov had said in
June that infrastructural projects alone for Euro 2012 cost Ukraine Hr 40
billion.

The Regions
has also been doling budget cash by raising pensions and salaries to public
employers several times over the past year. The tactic has clearly worked in
favor of the party’s popularity: despite the fact that close to half of
Ukrainians are saying they are not satisfied with the current political
situation, the Regions are leading in polls with 23.5 percent of support,
according to the latest poll by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

Experts say
the Regions have also partially managed to mobilize Russian-speaking voters in
the east and south through adoption of the language law that allows for Russian
a regional language. The Regions hope to get 85-87 parliament seats through the
proportional system, and supplement them with a whopping 130 majority
candidates.  Fesenko says they have a decent
chance to achieve this goal.

One of the
reasons why they can do it is the fact that the Regions representatives are
heavily dominating local election bodies. They are also ruthless campaigners.
OPORA elections watchdog called the Regions Party the biggest violator of
campaign rules.

Rybak says
the accusations are nothing but political tricks.

“Go to the courts
and you will see that we are far from the first place,” he said. “There are 50-50
court rulings against us and the opposition.”

But Olga
Aivazovska, the election programs coordinator for OPORA, says that “only tens
of cases reach the courts, while we have information about hundreds of
cases.” 

Kyiv Post staff writer Denis Rafalsky can be
reached at rafalsky@kyivpost.com and Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at grytsenko@kyivpost.com.