Political End Run

By Volodymyr Kish

Ukraine, as we all know, is heading for a crucial round of parliamentary elections this fall that will determine whether President Viktor Yanukovych and his merry band of Regionaires will be able to continue redirecting Ukraine’s GDP into their private off-shore bank accounts.  For most of the past year, reputable polls have shown that the vast majority of Ukraine’s long suffering population, including those in the Regions Party backyard of Donetsk and Luhansk, are well aware that they have been conned and are being robbed blind by the current band of political kleptocrats that control the government and Parliament.  So, one would think that it should be a slam dunk for the electorate to turf them out in the upcoming election.  When your popularity is approaching single digits, it would take electoral manipulation and fraud on a massive scale to win the election and with so many outside observers present, such shenanigans would not escape attention.

And yet, Yanukovych and the Regionaires, no doubt assisted by the best political advisors that their countless billions can buy, have come up with what is rapidly beginning to look like a winning strategy.  Remarkably, the Ukrainian nationalist opposition forces both in Ukraine and abroad are doing everything they can to help Yanukovych win!

Yanukovych and his minions realized some months ago that there is no way they could campaign on the strength of their record of the past few years, a record chock full of economic disasters, rampant corruption, growing unemployment, mounting debt and administrative incompetence.  The Opposition obviously had abundant ammunition with which to skewer the current administration in any electoral contest.

So, they obviously needed to create a diversionary crisis that would draw the electorate’s attention away from their sorry record and have them focus on something they could manipulate for their purposes.  In particular, they needed to bring back into the fold that base of some 30% of the Russian speaking voters in the east and south of Ukraine who have supported them in the past and whom they were beginning to lose according to all the polls.

The answer of course was the contentious law passed by the Verkhovna Rada to give official regional status to the Russian language.  They knew that it would generate a strong and hopefully violent reaction among the Ukrainian nationalist opposition, and in this they were not disappointed.  In fact that is exactly what they intended.  Get the Opposition totally focused on the language issue to the exclusion of everything else.  The stronger the opposition, the better – that way they could stoke up the fear and paranoia of the Russian speaking voters and cast themselves as the only protection standing between them and those “rabid Ukrainian nationalists”. 

That plan has been working perfectly.  The Ukrainian media has been talking of nothing else but the protests and demonstrations against the Russian language law.  Instead of talking about the real issues, the political and electoral agenda has become dominated by the artificial but highly emotional issue of language.  And most Ukrainians both in Ukraine and in the diaspora have fallen for this clever political ploy.  The louder and stronger we protest, the more fear we instil in those Russian speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine, and the more we guarantee that they will vote for Yanukovych and the Party of Regions in the upcoming elections.

But you say, shouldn’t we be defending the Ukrainian language?  Of course we do, but let’s do it smartly.  The best way of doing that would be by doing everything possible to win this election, then with control of Parliament, this clearly unconstitutional law would be easily negated.  Doing it smartly means controlling the agenda and issues on which this election will be fought.  Instead, we have let Yanukovych set the agenda and are fighting the election on his terms, terms that are heavily weighted in his favour.

I have gotten used to the fact that, though Ukrainians are smart and talented in many things, when it comes to politics we seem to be missing some crucial chromosomes.  This is a grand example of how we have been manipulated to respond emotionally instead of intelligently.  I only hope that it is not too late to change course.