Ukraine: Legislative elections - full text
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In legislative elections on Sept. 30, Ukraine’s pro-Western reform parties appeared to have won a slim majority of seats in the Verkhovna Rada (the unicameral legislature), according to partial results released by the electoral commission in early October.
The pro-Russian ruling Party of the Regions (PRU), led by incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, appeared to have won the largest number of votes of any one party. According to preliminary results released by the Central Electoral Commission, the PRU won just over 34 per cent. However, a strong result for former Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko's main opposition party, the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT), which won nearly 31 per cent of vote, made Tymoshenko a leading contender for the post of prime minister. The BYuT vote count with that of ally President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party (which appeared to have won just over 14 per cent of the vote), gave the two parties a combined slim majority over the PRU.
The election had been called in May following months of political paralysis.
Immediate Context
Yushchenko had been elected president in December 2004 after massive demonstrations, dubbed the “orange revolution”, when pro-democracy protesters won a campaign for fresh elections after claiming that the apparent election victory of the PRU had been achieved by fraud. Tymoshenko became prime minister after the “orange revolution”, but held the position only for a few months. While serving as chief executive of the Ukrainian gas corporation United Energy Systems of Ukraine, she had been a close business partner of former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko.
However, Yushchenko’s influence had been waning since the “orange revolution”. In August 2006, he was forced to give Yanukovych the post of prime minister after the PRU's strong showing in legislative elections. With Yanukovych’s PRU holding a plurality of seats in the Verkhovna Rada, the president had been increasingly sidelined and in April had dissolved the legislature on the grounds that pro-presidential Our Ukraine (NU) deputies were being bribed to switch factions. When the Rada continued to sit in defiance of the president’s decree, Yushchenko, Yanukovych, and Verkhovna Rada speaker Oleksandr Moroz, leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU), agreed on May 27 to hold elections on Sept. 30; subsequently, opposition deputies from NU and BYuT resigned their mandates, making the Verkhovna Rada inquorate. The remaining deputies in the Rada continued to sit until its summer recess on June 27, and reconvened at Moroz’s behest on Sept. 4 to endorse a bill stripping legislators of immunity from prosecution.
Before the voting, Yushchenko pleaded with voters to keep the country on the reformist track, alluding to loss of reform momentum after the “orange revolution”.
Reaction and Outlook
On Oct. 3 President Viktor Yushchenko urged the BYuT, NU, and the PRU to begin negotiations on forming a coalition. Tymoshenko said that she would enter no coalition with PRU, the newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda reported.
Two days after the election, and while the votes were still being counted, Russia's state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom, on Oct. 2 announced that might cut gas supplies to Ukraine over a US$1.3 billion debt, in what commentators speculated was a move to endorse a pro-Russian PRU-led coalition.
EU officials expressed concern about energy security, because most of the natural gas consumed by Western Europe travelled through Ukraine. EU spokesman Ferran Tarradellas Espuny appealed to both Gazprom and the Ukrainian authorities to resolve the dispute “as quickly as possible”, the International Herald Tribune reported on Oct. 3.
Historical context
In the mid-17th century, Ukraine was partitioned between Poland and Russia. In 1654, the larger eastern portion was integrated into Russia as the Cossack Hetmanate. Tsarist Russia allowed the Hetmanate relative autonomy for the first 100 years, but during the mid-1800s, it repressed Ukrainian nationalism.
After the division of Poland at the end of the 18th century by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, western Ukraine (Galicia) was taken over by Austria. Galicia included the territory around Lublin and Cracow in present-day Poland, as well as the territory around Lviv (Lvov), Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk now in Ukraine. The Austrian period lasted from 1772 until 1918. After the end of World War I, until 1939, that territory, which now constitutes western Ukraine, was part of Poland.
Following the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917, eastern Ukraine enjoyed a short-lived period of independence (1917-20), then it became the battlefield of Bolsheviks and White Russians and later the scene of warfare between Russians and Poles. It endured a brutal Soviet rule that engineered two artificial famines (1921-22 and 1932-33) in which more than 8 million Ukrainians died. As a result of the German-USSR non-aggression pact and the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union seized the Polish part of Galicia in September 1939, and attached it to the Ukrainian SSR. This area--western Ukraine--remained the engine of Ukrainian nationalism and the heartland of support for the pro-Western parties of Yuliya Tymoshenko and President Viktor Yushchenko. Eastern Ukraine, which comprised the steel-producing Donbass and Dnieper river regions, was populated largely by Russian speakers who supported the PRU.
The borders of the Ukrainian SSR were changed again in 1945, when Transcarpathian Ukraine (Ruthenia) was ceded by Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR, and in 1954, when the Crimea was transferred from the Russian to the Ukrainian SSR, the Tatar population having been expelled by the Soviet authorities in 1944.
During World War II, when the Nazis began to invade the Soviet Union, some Ukrainians collaborated, due in part to the hostility towards the Russians as a result of the suppression of Ukrainian nationalism. After the war, the Soviet authorities confiscated grain crops, ignoring drought conditions of 1946, resulting in another famine that killed thousands. In western Ukraine, Ukrainians continued to resist Soviet rule until the early 1950s.
Ukrainian nationalism continued to be suppressed by the Soviet regime in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, Petro Shelest, was fired as First Secretary of Communist Party of Ukraine, having been seen as “too independent” by the Soviet central government in Moscow. He was replaced by Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who pursued expanded Russification policies and continued suppression of dissent. In the 1980s, it came to light that Soviet authorities were detaining Ukrainian intellectuals in psychiatric facilities for reasons that included criticising the Soviet Union, attempting to emigrate or talking to westerners.
Official secrecy over the Chernobyl explosion in 1986--the world's worst nuclear disaster--prompted public support for opposition to the authorities and increasing calls for autonomy from groups of intellectuals, religious leaders, and workers' organisations.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine declared independence and elected Leonid Kravchuk, a former member of the Ukrainian politburo and chairman of the Rada, as president. In the first years of independence, from 1992 to 1994, annual inflation rates were exorbitant, but in the late 1990s, the country managed to establish a stable currency. However, the privatisation of the country's industry was plagued by corruption and the country did not establish itself a reliable destination for foreign investment.
