Parliamentary elections: necessary in times of war?

The current Ukrainian Parliament was elected in 2012. The elections were organized by a political group established and introduced to the political scene by former President Viktor Yanukovych. Therefore the old rules on elections were mostly favorable to his party – the Party of Regions.

Playing games with election rules

In 2007 the Parliament was elected by a proportional method, with a 3% threshold. After President Yanukovych implemented certain political reforms (giving himself as a President more political influence),the Parliament was elected by a semi-proportional election method in 2012, which meant that 50% of deputies were elected by voting on party lists (with a 5% threshold) and the other 50% as majority candidates. These election laws paired with abuses of the governing party left the Party of Regions with 187 out of 450 seats in Parliament. After the Communist Party joined them, President Yanukovych could govern with a strong coalition. With a parliamental majority and an increasingly dominant position of the President, parliamentary democracy was weakened and the power of the executive strengthened in the Ukraine. 

One of the democratic ideas of the Maidan movement was to turn away from the presidential system and come back to parliamentarism. So did the Ukrainian Parliament (Rada) after the events on Maidan: they voted against Yanukovych's reforms and re-established a parliamentarian system. But the Parliament did not pass a new election legislation and we can suppose that this lack of reform favoured again the executive.

Now it is Petro Poroshenko, the new Ukrainian President, who would prefer this system, since it would grant him enough power to carry out reforms. According to the polls, the Presidential Party may achieve a strong majority thanks to the party list and majority candidates, and small parties will not have any access to Parliament with 5% barrier.

In the end, the new President will be using the same “rules of the game” that Yanukovych did, which could again lead to the strengthening of the executive power.

Populism VS Meritocracy

It is hard to stay objective and neutral in war time. Emotions are high, and we can see partiotism and social activism as developements, but at the same time the political scene was distorted by radicalization. People would like to stop the war but only a few want to compromise. Before the war it was hard to find examples of the “hate speech” in Ukraine, now we see thousands of pages of commentaries in social media, full of aggression and anger.

The problem is that in times of war nobody wants to take good and reasonable decisions that would pay off on the longrun. Everybody wants to win people's love and attention. And to achieve this politicians are ready to sow seeds of hatred. Elections therefore look like a war between the candidates.

It should be ackowledged that President Poroshenko and his team lead a good informational policy, without presenting aggressive goals, while trying to build dialogue and consensus across the country. At the same time the Radical Party's popularity soars with populist Oleg Lyashko expecting to get 9% of votes.

For a system of meritocracy to be implemented the country would need a higher level of political culture and less emotional political discourse, which is almost impossible when society is going through such tragic moments.

The price of the elections

Elections are expensive procedures. The State allocated more than 1 billion hryvna (about 1 million Euro) to the organization of the elections. More than 600 million hryvna (about 60 000 Euro) were spent by politicians on their election campaigns.

In the state where soldiers don't have enough bulletproof vests and refugees from the East don't have anywhere to live, these sums seem absurd.

Of course, Western countries and the World bank support Ukraine and without this support we could not imagine living conditions as they are now: with different social pensions, decent life conditions (on the territory under control of Ukraine, because there is a real humanitarian crisis on the territories which are under control of “Peoples Republics”). We of course needed elections, but the way in which they were organized seemed out of touch with reality.

Impossible to organize elections on the territories controlled by separatists

In the Donbass region, Ukraine cannot organize elections in 14 of 32 electoral districts. People who left the country or settled in others regions of Ukraine have the possibility to vote from distance, but it will not be easy for them either. It is impossible to organize Ukrainian elections in Donetsk (of about 1 million inhabitants before the war, city is now under control of armed separatists) and Luhansk (about 400 000 inhabitants), because “governours” of the city proclaimed those elections illegal.

Annexed Crimea could not participate in elections either, the only way to vote for Crimeans is to go to the continent and vote there, because unfortunately we have not built an electronic system for Crimeans (2,2 million population, of whom 2% refused to accept the Russian citizenship, others became citizens of Russia “by default”).

For these reasons the elections were complicated to organize, but despite all the obstacles they would be important and necessary to change the political elite. Our only hope is to organize fair elections with high turnout.