2009-10-28 | Tadeusz A. Olszański

The official campaign before the presidential elections scheduled for 17 January 2010 began on 19 October. The frontrunners are Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko. Neither of them is likely to gain an absolute majority in the first round, and so the election is expected to be resolved in a runoff on 31 January.
The beginning of the campaign clearly shows that it will not involve any debate on the condition and future of the Ukrainian state, as was the case in the 2004 election. Since there are no significant differences in programme between the main candidates, the campaign will be definitely populist and probably very brutal.

Registration of candidates

Under the election laws, candidates may be registered between 19 October and 6 November. However, nearly all the major candidates already put themselves forward during the first week. They include the frontrunners Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, as well as politicians for whom the current campaign is no more than preparation for next year's local elections and the likely subsequent parliamentary elections: the former defence minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who until recently has been regarded as the elections' 'dark horse', the incumbent president Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of the People's Party Volodymyr Lytvyn, the Communist leader Petro Symonenko, the socialist candidate Serhiy Tyhipko, and the head of the extreme-nationalist Svoboda party Oleh Tiahnybok. Yuriy Kostenko, the head of the Ukrainian People's Party, as well as a number of outsiders, are still expected to register.

The candidates' showings

According to a poll conducted in late September which was commissioned by the Ukrainian Reform Support Foundation associated with the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, Yanukovych is clearly the frontrunner and no candidates apart from himself and Tymoshenko will count in the ballot. Declared support for Yanukovych in the first round is running at 28.7% (a increase of 0.9% since July), 19.0% for Tymoshenko (+2.1%), and 8.2% for Yatsenyuk (a fall of as much as 4.9%). Among the other candidates, only Symonenko exceeds the 3% threshold, Yushchenko being backed by 2.8% of respondents. In the course of the campaign, the showings of some minor candidates may improve, but not to any extent that could challenge the two frontrunners.
The forecasts concerning the runoff are even clearer: Yanukovych would win 40.3% of the vote (an increase of 2.7% since July), and Tymoshenko 32.6% (up by 3.7%). It is notable that here, the respondents are more decided than they are with regard to the first round: only 8.8% have declared that they would not know who to vote for in the second round, compared to as much as 20.3% for the first round.
This implies that Yulia Tymoshenko still has a chance to challenge Yanukovych in the second round on an equal footing. Whether this chance materialises will largely depend on the turnout, and on whether Tymoshenko succeeds in simultaneously maintaining her popularity in western Ukraine and taking over a portion of the Communists' electorate. The dynamism Tymoshenko demonstrated in previous campaigns may prove particularly effective in the final phase of the campaign. The prime minister will also benefit from the fact that, as the current head of government, she will be constantly present in the media.

Preliminary objectives of the election campaign

The most important objective for Viktor Yanukovych is, first of all, to hold onto his current electorate in eastern and southern Ukraine, take over Symonenko and Lytvyn's votes in the runoff, and to win new voters in the central districts. For Yulia Tymoshenko, the most important aim is to maintain her current popularity in the western part of the country, substantially improve her showing in the centre, and fight for the votes of Symonenko and Lytvyn supporters. While Yanukovych's objectives are coherent, Tymoshenko will be pursuing contradictory aims, as she will have to appeal to the communists, the nationalists and the rural voters who support Lytvyn all at the same time. However, this difficulty may become a mobilising challenge for her team, while the apparently easily attainable objectives of Yanukovych may take his staff off their guard; it has already been noted that his campaign is 'languid').
Yanukovych's campaign started steadily and without major alarms; this could be epitomised by his conventional electoral congress which ran on the slogans 'Politics is not the most important thing' and 'Ukraine for the people'. Tymoshenko, on the other hand, relocated her congress to Kiev's Independence Square, transforming it into a rally with one hundred thousand participants. Her slogans are 'Breakthrough for Ukraine' and 'She will win', where the 'she' refers equally to Ukraine and Tymoshenko. This suggests that her campaign will be highly emotional.
The programmes of both frontrunners are definitely populist, and both have been making quite similar pledges which are impossible to deliver but sound nice to the voters' ears. There seems to be no disagreement between Yanukovych and Tymoshenko on important issues: Yanukovych has openly spoken about Ukraine's 'non-bloc status', and Tymoshenko, too, does not count NATO membership among her objectives. When she refers to accession to the European Union, she knows that it cannot be attained, at least during her presidency. Similarly, Yanukovych's postulate concerning 'equal respect' for the Ukrainian and Russian languages (which certainly does not imply any pledge to grant the latter equal status as a state language) is also acceptable to Tymoshenko (even if she cannot admit that, because of the voters in western Ukraine).
In this situation, one should expect that during the campaign, the election staffs of the two frontrunners will accuse each other of treason, irresponsibility, and so on, and produce materials intended to discredit their rivals. The first signs of this were already apparent when the unconfirmed criminal allegations against Yanukovych were 'refreshed'. On the other hand, a serious debate about the condition of the Ukrainian state and ways to improve it is unlikely to happen.

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