An Orange Revolution by Askold Krushnelnycky

Author:Askold Krushnelnycky [Krushnelnycky, Askold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446444641
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There had been an unsuccessful attempt to impeach Kuchma in 1998. At the end of 2000, the Kuchmagate scandal, combined with concerns about corruption, authoritarianism, and impoverishment, triggered a protest campaign called ‘Ukraine Without Kuchma’ which dogged the president for the remainder of his term in office.

Yushchenko had never displayed avid political ambition, and perhaps this reticence endeared him to his countrymen. Meanwhile the fractured opposition needed a figure to coalesce around, and Yushchenko’s consistent popularity in opinion polls made him the natural choice. In 2002 he led an opposition coalition called Nasha Ukrayina – ‘Our Ukraine’ – into that spring’s parliamentary elections. The coalition of Western-oriented centre and centre-right parties advocated democratic, market and human rights reforms, pledged to fight corruption, and sought eventual membership of the EU. Yet despite Kuchma’s huge unpopularity he was able to manipulate the election to secure a majority for his supporters in the 450-seat parliament.

As in his own 1999 re-election, the main weapon Kuchma used against the opposition was what was known in Ukraine as admin-resource, short for administrative resources. Admin-resource entailed leaning on every level of official and threatening them with the loss of their positions unless they coaxed or intimidated enough people into voting the required way. As a starting point, that meant every official threatened to fire their underlings unless they also pulled out all the stops to get the correct result – a lot of votes in a country where a large proportion of the workforce are still state employees. The system was also applied to colleges and universities where students were threatened with expulsion unless they voted as ordered by the head of their institution. Hundreds of thousands of conscripts in Europe’s second largest army were routinely coerced into voting for the regime’s candidates, as were patients in hospitals and prison inmates. Admin-resource even penetrated into the private sector by threatening to launch crippling tax inspections or strangle businesses with red tape.

In addition to admin-resource, the parliamentary election system in 2002 was especially prone to manipulation. In those elections half the seats were distributed on the basis of national proportional repesentation, while the other half were filled by the candidates who gained most votes in the electoral constituencies. Where the winner was the person with the simple majority of votes in a constituency, fixing the outcome was relatively easy. The recordings secretly made by Kuchma’s errant bodyguard, Melnychenko, have Yanukovych gleefully confiding to the president that using the first-past-the-post type of election, rather than the proportional representation form, you could ‘get an orangutan into parliament’.

Many of the candidates poured huge amounts of money into quite openly buying votes or bribing election officials to fake the count or ignore ballot stuffing. Many of these candidates campaigned as independents and only showed their true colours after the election when they joined the pro-Kuchma camp in parliament. Some who fought the election on the opposition ticket later defected, reportedly for large bribes.

In March 2002 these abuses produced a victory for Kuchma.

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