Andreas Umland: Is Europe Losing Ukraine?
Largely unnoticed in the West, Ukraine’s new President, Viktor Yanukovych, has brought to power an illegitimate government, in March 2010. Though being installed via a seemingly orderly parliamentary procedure, the current Ukrainian cabinet headed by Prime-Minister Mykola Azarov has no proper popular mandate. Worse, according to Ukrainian press reports, Yanukovych’s actions received first hesitant, and later explicit support from official representatives of Western countries and organizations. How did that come about?...
Ukraine has a proportional electoral system with closed lists. Voters do not elect individual candidates, but can only approve of predetermined lists presented to them by various political parties or blocs. The members of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, become deputies only in so far as they are included in their bloc’s or party’s lists – the composition of which is beyond the reach of voters. The electoral success and resulting faction size of parties or blocs in parliament is thus mainly determined by the attractiveness of their ideologies, and charisma of their speakers. Individual party list members play little role in Ukrainian parliamentary elections which are contests between large political camps and their more or less magnetic leaders. This is in contrast to majoritarian or mixed electoral systems where the local standing of regional – and not only national – political leaders plays a prominent role in determining the makeup of the national legislature.
Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych.
For better or worse, Ukraine has abandoned first its early post-Soviet majoritarian and later its mixed electoral systems. It now conducts (except for a 3% barrier) purely proportional parliamentary elections in which individual list members, other than the small circle of nationally known party leaders, play little role during the electoral campaigns. Accordingly, Ukraine’s Constitution ascribes to parliament’s factions, and not to MPs, a decisive role in the formation of a governmental coalition. A government has to be based on the support of registered parliamentary groups, and cannot be voted into office by individual MPs. True, such a rule gives excessive power to faction leaders and belittles the role of the deputy as a people’s representative. Yet, the factions’ exclusive role in government coalition formation is consistent with, and follows from, the electoral system. In so far as voters are not given a chance to express their opinion on individual candidates, the elected deputies have to act first and foremost as faction members. Within proportional electoral systems, it is not them as individuals, but their factions as fixed political collectives recruited from prearranged lists that represent the voters will, in legislature....
...[T]he international embeddedness of Ukraine’s democracy as a normative frame structuring politics in Kyiv has recently been suffering from ambiguity. A first faux pas was the timing of the European Parliament’s recent resolution approving of an EU membership perspective for Ukraine. The resolution as such constituted doubtlessly a step in the right direction, against the background of the EU’s earlier policy of indicating much, but promising little, to Ukraine. When the EuroParl resolution endorsing Ukraine’s right to apply for full EU membership was adopted, in Strasbourg, on February 25th, 2010, it was immediately and widely hailed in Ukrainian mass media and by Kyiv’s experts community. Then Foreign Minister Petro Poroshenko even called, on Ukrainian TV, the date of 25th February 2010 a “historic day” in Ukraine’s post-Soviet development.
What, however, is difficult to understand regarding that resolution is that it was adopted not before, but after the Ukrainian presidential elections of January-February 2010. It would have been in the vital interests of both the member states and organs of the EU to send such an important signal to the Ukrainian people and elites in advance of, and not following, the recent standoff between pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko and pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. If adopted before the first round of the elections, say, in November 2009, the EuroParl resolution would have influenced, if not restructured Ukraine’s domestic political debate. It might have made the defeat of Yulia Tymoshenko – whose self-styled image is that of Ukraine’s most ardent pro-European politician – in the presidential elections narrower or even unlikely. Instead, the European Parliament’s resolution adoption after the second round of the presidential elections and victory of Yanukovych can now be interpreted as an endorsement of the election falsifiers of 2004. At least, it appears that Yanukovich seems to have interpreted Europe’s new tolerance this way. For instance, on April 2, 2010, he impertinently named Serhiy Kivalov, the former Head of the Central Electoral Commission, i.e. the chief voting falsifier of 2004, as Ukraine’s official deputy member of the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission for Democracy through Law – thereby setting a fox to keep the geese.
Moreover, the West has apparently played a certain role in legitimizing the dubious government formation of March 2010. Interestingly, Yanukovych seems to have understood the problematic aspects of the planned takeover of the executive branch of government by the Party of Regions with the help of turncoats from opposed parliamentary factions. According to press reports, a day before the approbation of the Azarov government in the Verkhovna Rada on March 11, the new Ukrainian President consulted the Ambassadors of the G8 countries (i.e. including Russia’s envoy) about whether their countries would accept a government elected by individual MPs, i.e. including deserters from opposed camps, and not by factions. Allegedly, after some controversial discussion, either the majority or all of the Ambassadors gave Yanukovich green light under the condition that the President would ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the issue of the constitutionality of the new government. The Ambassadors, reportedly, also insisted that the Party of Regions would cooperate with other political forces. While it seems that Yanukovych is largely ignoring the latter agreement, he indeed submitted a request concerning the legitimacy of the Azarov government to the Constitutional Court, as demanded by the Ambassadors.
The Ambassadors’ approach to the new President is understandable: They and their governments are, above all, interested in political stability, in Ukraine. And, in Western political systems too, the status of deputies’ popular mandate is not well-defined: Are they free to behave as they wish, or bound by party discipline? If the latter: To which exact degree is the MPs’ freedom of action circumscribed? In the Western context, such questions would be seen as issues to be decided by a constitutional council or court. Review by the Constitutional Court is thus the obvious way to go....
Western observers and visitors should understand that, for many Ukrainian politicians, the main political question is still not what is legitimate, but what is doable and whether they can get away with it. When dealing with the Party of Regions, European and other partners of Ukraine should keep in mind that the anti-Orange camp led by Yanukovych never received a majority in national elections. Yanukovych is the first Ukrainian President elected to office with less than 50% of the votes in the decisive second round of the elections. Nevertheless, Yanukovych has now taken firm control not only of the legislature, but also of the entire executive branch, including government, regional administrations, the Central Bank, security service etc. Ukraine’s European partners should make clear that a stable government is certainly of value, but that stability “a la Putin” will be unacceptable should Ukraine want to keep its European perspective.
Ukraine’s decision makers, in turn, have to understand that semi-formal observance of democratic rules and merely rhetorical acceptance of political pluralism will be insufficient to keep the country on track to eventual EU membership – an aim to which all relevant political actors seem committed. Oral agreement to certain actions even by official Western delegations will not be enough to ensure sustainability in Ukraine’s move towards Europe, for the next years. Statements, like those reportedly made by Adrian Severin, could eventually even mislead the Ukrainian leadership to believe that everything is OK. Instead, it is possible that the government formation of March 11 will lead to a downgrading of Ukraine in future democracy rankings, like those of Freedom House. Should Ukraine, for instance, be relegated by Freedom House from “free” to “partly free,” this could have grave political repercussions for Ukraine. The Western public would again start to see Ukraine as a country “in between” democracy and authoritarianism, and not as a state firmly committed to European values. Ukraine would slide into the category of countries like Moldova, Georgia or Armenia – semi-democracies that the EU hopes to include some day, but regards today far from rife to be offered a membership perspective. It is not some selected Ambassadors or EU officials, but the people of Europe – including the Ukrainians themselves – whom the new political leadership of Ukraine will have to convince of its commitment to democracy and the rule of law.