Although the official results of the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election have not been announced, it is clear that the country’s next president will be Viktor Yanukovych. Over the past three weeks, Yulia Tymoshenko failed to close the 10-point lead Yanukovych has held since the first round of voting. Every attempt to convince voters that as president she would take the country along a new path of development didn’t convince people who asked themselves, “If Tymoshenko wasn’t able to move the country in the right direction after being prime minister for two years, how will she be able to do any better as president?”
Tymoshenko’s failure proved that it is impossible to win a presidential race after serving as prime minister of a country that was hit harder by the crisis than any other nation in Europe. Since the crisis started, the budget deficit, inflation and the government debt have soared to dangerously high levels, and the standard of living of Ukrainians plummeted.
According to Ukrainian law, public opinion polls cannot publish their results less than two weeks before an election, but in private conversation, several well-respected pollsters have told me that they expect Yanukovych’s lead to actually increase prior to the final vote. If the spread is greater than 5 percentage points, it will be difficult for Tymoshenko to challenge the results and demand a recount as she did back in 2004, which stripped Yanukovych of his self-proclaimed “victory.”
One of the biggest factors that crippled Tymoshenko’s ability to close the gap in the past three weeks was her failure to win the support of Sergei Tigipko, a successful businessman and former Central Bank chairman who came in third place in the first round with 13 percent of the vote. In the major cities of Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov and Odessa, Tigipko actually received the second-highest number of votes. It was clear that supporting Tymoshenko or Yanukovych was not an option for Tigipko. Ukrainians voted for Tigipko because they were fed up with both Yanukovych and Tymoshenko, and Tigipko campaigned as an alternative to both of these candidates. If Tigipko now supports either of his main opponents, his legitimacy will be compromised in the minds of his supporters.
Tigipko also put little faith in Tymoshenko’s “promise” to make him prime minister if she won the presidential race. After all, only the ruling coalition in the parliament has the right to appoint the prime minister, and that coalition is now on the verge of collapsing. Tigipko was unwilling to trade his voter base for an uncertain shot at the prime minister spot. His failure to nibble at Tymoshenko’s bait put the final nail in the coffin of her presidential campaign.
And what a bizarre campaign it was. The presidential candidates never focused on the most urgent problems facing the country. There was very little discussion about how to overcome the crisis and little attention was paid to the issue of reforming the constitution, making Ukraine the only country where the ruling power is shared simultaneously by the president, the parliament and the Cabinet. Keeping this terribly unwieldy political arrangement in place guarantees that the government will be crippled by political infighting, chaos and an inability to carry out its basic functions. But instead of focusing on what Ukraine needs the most, the candidates engaged in a mud-slinging fest, accusing each other of everything from hypocrisy, lying and corruption to betraying Ukraine’s national interests.
One of Tymoshenko’s campaign strategies was to try to portray Yanukovych as Moscow’s puppet. But Yanukovych countered by making a number of statements toward the close of the campaign that were clearly intended to show that he is willing to stand up to Moscow by demanding lower prices in gas contracts and opposing the South Stream pipeline project, which will bypass Ukraine. More important, however, Yanukovych went further by questioning the sacrosanct issue of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol, saying the current rental price for the base is far too low.
Are these just empty words intended to deflect accusations by the opposition that Yanukovych was too pro-Russian, or is there a real chance that he means what he says? Once Yanukovych becomes president, we will be able to answer this question.
Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst and hosts a political talk show on Inter television in Ukraine.