Political party changes in Ukraine point to generational shift

Rinat Akhmetov, founder and president of System
Capital Management (SCM), will be founding a new political party, pravda.com.ua
reported on April 26. In the article, sources claimed that the party, nicknamed
“Regions 2.0”, aims to bring forward professionals, primarily from Akhmetov’s
holdings, who wish to enter politics. The mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko,
who is a former employee of SCM-owned companies, is held up as an example.

The Opposition Bloc, which was created after the
collapse of Party of Regions with the flight to Russia of Viktor Yanukovych in
2014, is not being actively mined for candidates. The article quotes a former
MP from the party as saying that, “…the project will simply be closed and
forgotten.”

The article also quotes the source as saying,
“Zelensky showed us all the example that now it makes no sense to create a
pro-Russian party or a pro-European party – because it means that these parties
will work for other countries.”

Also on April 26, online media rbc.ua published an
interview with the former Holos party candidate for mayor of Kyiv, Serhiy
Prytula. In the interview, Prytula announced his desire to formally become head
of the liberal Holos party in Kyiv after the departure of Okean Elzy frontman
and Holos founder Sviatoslav Vakarchuk. Holos has been running on a flat
hierarchy under the de facto management of Kira Rudyk and MP Yaroslav
Zheleznyak, according to pravda.com.ua, though a significant wing of the party
prefers a more structured hierarchy. Prytula claims that the management of the
party has agreed to a general meeting, but has not set a date.

James Hydzik: Akhmetov’s
creation of a new party will not mean an automatic entry to politics for many
of the candidates. The article in pravda.com.ua points to the competition in
Kryvyi Rih for the mayorship between Akhmetov’s former employee, Dmytro
Shevchuk, and Opposition Bloc’s Konstantin Pavlov, which Pavlov won. This
points to the permanence of the split seen in recent elections across the south
and east of the country between pro-Russian voters and those with a more local
focus.

At the same time, the moves in Holos could determine
whether it sinks as a party or not, even though it was set up with a party
structure using its head more as a tuning fork, as pravda.com.ua put it, than a
leader.

Both topics show that political life in Ukraine has
not succumbed to large-scale geopolitics, and that the upcoming generation of
young and would-be politicians is feeling its way in manners that are familiar
but without the east-versus-west polarization that greatly determined previous
factions.