Ukraine parliament approves local elections law

Ukraine’s parliament approved on July 14 the first reading of the law on local elections. The legislation sets new conditions for these elections that consist of a ban on blocs of parties and allowing all parties to compete that were registered on the day of the bill’s approval, reported the pravda.com.ua news site.

Most importantly, the bill doesn’t create open-list voting for parties, as has long been advocated by civil society and which Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko claimed to support. Instead, it creates single-mandate districts for regional and city councils that require voting for an individual candidate (belonging to a party), instead of the party itself, according to a source in parliament. Yet should the candidate’s party not meet a quota in a given election district (or region), the candidate can’t take office regardless if he or she won the most votes.

Candidates for mayor in towns with a population of 90,000 or more need to win an absolute majority of 50 percent or more or undergo a second-round runoff, pravda.com.ua reported. Candidates in towns with smaller populations will merely have to win the most votes to win their election, even if they fall short of a majority.

Elections won’t be held on the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas owing to “Russia’s temporary occupation and armed aggression against Ukraine and the inability to ensure OSCE standards in holding elections,” said during the session MP Ruslan Kniazevych of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. More than 1,500 amendments have been prepared for review in the bill’s second reading, pravda.com.ua reported.

Zenon Zawada: What’s most important about these elections is the tone being set by the current government. In this case, the tone is cynical since the rules are being changed yet again to fit the needs of those in power. The coalition parties (led by the Poroshenko Bloc and People’s Front led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk) are seeking to arrange the rules to ensure they will win majorities in local councils, as well as the mayorships.

If Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk were serious about establishing rule of law and equality before the law, they and their parties would establish one set of permanent rules that would ensure that all elections – regardless of their level – would most accurately reflect the will and the choice of the public. Such rules would include equal financing for all parties and open-list voting that allows candidates to take the seats they won, regardless of their respective party’s performance.

So this law is positive in the sense that it will ensure the Poroshenko Bloc a dominant position in local governing bodies, and it could gain even more dominance upon merging with Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front. It gives the president political support in the short term in a time of war and further cements his power hierarchy to extend to all of Ukraine’s regions, somewhat similar to what his predecessors Kuchma and Yanukovych did. It’s entirely possible that the public will accept this state of affairs as necessary, depending on how the war progresses.

Yet it is negative in the sense that it merely confirms Ukraine’s top politicians aren’t planning for Ukraine’s mid- to long-term stability. Almost everything they do is strictly oriented on achieving short- term goals and they are failing to set a firm foundation for the nation’s long-term development. We believe the current government’s narrow-minded approach to politics will lead to a political crisis to some degree within a year, depending on how the war unfolds. Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk want to conduct business as usual with some window-dressing, and the strategy will fail certainly in the mid-term, but possibly in the short term.