UKL444 - Chair of Ukrainian Studies

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“This is the same paradigm,” Marynovych said. “For the future, we need to judge the steps of our ancestors.” #19 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ukraine After The Elections Forthcoming in OSCE Yearbook 2010 (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft) By Oleh Protsyk (protsyk@ecmi.de) Oleh Protsyk is Senior Research Associate at ECMI, Flensburg, Germany In February 2010 Ukraine saw the inauguration of its fourth president since the proclamation of independence in 1991. Viktor Yanukovych, the leader of the Party of Regions, won the highly contested presidential election. The elections were generally perceived as free and fair. Yanukovych´s victory was clear and not seriously disputed. It was, however, not an overly impressive win: Yanukovych received the lowest share of votes of any winner in a presidential race since independence. Even the fact that elections took place at the time of a very acute economic crisis and that Yanukovych’s opponent in the second round was an incumbent prime minister – sitting governments usually suffer significantly in times of crisis – did not help to make the victory more convincing. Regardless of the actual strength of Yanukovych’s electoral mandate, the expectations for change have been, and remain, very high. Obviously, different constituencies inside the country have quite different types of changes in mind. There are, however, some widely shared expectations that constitute a common denominator for the changes that Ukrainian society hopes for. The following three items would feature prominently on any hypothetical list of societal wishes: reducing ideological polarization and regional divisions, strengthening the governability and the effectiveness of state apparatus, improving the health of the economy. This chapter provides an overview of how the new Ukrainian administration has started addressing these societal wishes. Each of the wishes constitutes a formidable challenge for the government. At the time of writing (May 2010), the new president had not been in office long enough for this chapter to offer any definite assessment of the strategies and approaches he is likely to pursue. What follows is a very preliminary analysis of the first steps, and possible trajectories suggested by these steps. Country’s unity Ukraine’s ethno-cultural heterogeneity does not need to be a liability for the country’s political and economic development. After all, many countries, which - similarly to Ukraine - are culturally diverse polities, manage to turn their diversity into a competitive advantage. The problem is not diversity per se but rather the growing politicization of ethno-cultural differences in Ukraine over the last decade. To conceptualize Ukraine´s diversity, some scholars prefer to use the term regional differences rather than ethno-cultural differences – these are legitimate and consequential conceptual disagreements - but the essence of the problem remains the same: Ukrainian politics is increasingly organized along ethno-cultural rather than socio-economic lines.
The last presidential election confirmed this pattern – voters in different parts of Ukraine had radically different preferences in terms of candidates. Identity politics and related geopolitical issues were used by the candidates to rally their core supporters and mobilize the base, irrespective of the costs for societal cohesion or the country‟s unity. The election results revealed a familiar pattern: the vote for the two leading candidates was heavily concentrated in the east and the west of the country, with the center regions showing less unequal distribution of votes for the two candidates. Yanukovych’s rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, was, however, the clear winner in all the central regions of Ukraine, including the city of Kyiv. Prioritizing ethno-cultural differences over other lines of societal differences, and turning the former differences into the basis for defining society’s primary political cleavage, is very problematic, unless a society is already deeply divided in ethnocultural terms (e.g. Northern Ireland). Organization of politics along classical ideological lines – usually left-right divisions about economy and redistribution - is superior to the organization of politics along ethno-cultural or regional lines. This thesis has strong theoretical foundations. It is also borne out by the experience of many Western democracies where socio-economic divisions and left-right party competition which exploits these divisions form the principal cleavage line and structure the entire political process. Much of the Ukrainian political class nevertheless seems to be bent on pursuing a course of action that hardens societal identities and turns them into the main source of political conflict. While ethno-cultural differences have always been a factor in Ukrainian politics, their politicization became firmly institutionalized in the 2000s with the events of the Orange revolution and, especially, with the 2006 legal changes that introduced a fully proportional (PR) electoral system. The PR rules empowered political parties at the expense of independent or party-unaffiliated regional politicians that played a major role during the first decade of transition. After having acquired a monopoly on political representation in the second half of the 2000s, parties started to face the need to articulate coherent programmatic positions and to build societal support for politics based on ideologies. Instead of pursuing the difficult task of building universalistic political agendas based on the pursuit of policy programs that distribute benefits and costs to all citizens, the main political parties choose an easier route – to campaign on ethno-cultural differences and on promises to deliver targeted benefits for their regionally concentrated clientele. Ukrainian politics is not, of course, all about clientelistic linkages. As elsewhere, parties try to mix their strategies for building ties with voters, so parties also put some efforts into forming two other types of voter linkages – programmatic and charismatic. Yet while the charisma of individual leaders has been an important (albeit inherently unstable) source of strength for some parties, appeals to regionally concentrated electorates proved to be a more enduring source of parties´ electoral success. As has already been implied, programmatic linkages – understood here as ties based on party promises of universally conceived social and economic policies – are significantly underdeveloped. Such ties usually characterize parties built on market-liberal or, alternatively, socialist ideologies. These are not parties that dominate Ukraine’s political landscape. The very name of President Yanukovych’s party illustrates this point. The party’s name -- Party of Regions – highlights the party´s original intention to use regional issues as the primary basis of its political appeal.
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