Rada elections should be exclusive open-list voting, former vice PM says

Ukraine’s parliament should pass legislation to make
the electoral system in the 2019 parliamentary elections exclusively based on
open lists in order to prevent a pro-Russian revanche, Oleh Rybachuk, a former
vice prime minister, said in a column published on Sept. 28 on the dt.ua news
site. Russian-oriented forces are capable of bringing as many as 60 MPs to
parliament from Ukraine’s 200 single-mandate districts, estimated Rybachuk, who
currently leads the Centre UA NGO. MPs within the Opposition Bloc said they
expect to control at least 100 seats in the next parliament (out of 425 total),
as reported by the pravda.com.ua news site.

President Poroshenko currently supports keeping the
single-mandate districts because he can rely on influential allies to influence
vote results in difficult regions, Rybachuk said. Yet the Russian government
will also be relying on them to foment chaos during the elections, he said. “No
doubt, under conditions of organized chaos, Russian mass media will spread the
message of the horror at Ukraine’s elections and the death of Ukrainian
democracy,” he wrote. “The problems with the single-mandate districts will give
cards into the Kremlin’s hands, squeezing through its candidates with one arm,
while gaining yet another pretext to talk about Ukraine as a failed state with
the other.”

Recall, half of Ukraine’s parliamentary seats are
determined by closed party lists, in which voters select only a party and not
an individual candidate. The other half are determined by single-mandate
districts, in which the candidate gaining the most votes in a particular
territory wins. President Poroshenko promised to introduce open lists (in which
voters select candidates representing a party, not a geographical district) for
the 2014 parliamentary elections, but backed away.

Zenon Zawada: We agree
that among the most important things that parliament can do to secure Ukraine’s
Euro-Atlantic integration is to approve legislation that would make the 2019
parliamentary elections exclusively based on open-list voting and eliminate
single-mandate districts. We agree that preserving the single-mandate districts
highly enhances the chances of the next cabinet being formed by
Russian-oriented forces.

On the one hand, such a move will likely create
enormous gridlock in the next parliament, as eight parties are projected by
polls to qualify. Therefore, it will be even more difficult for the president
to find the necessary votes for legislation. But if the single-mandate
districts remain (determining half the seats), then we expect an attempt to not
only take control of the cabinet, but also possibly to remove a pro-Western
president.