In Kiev's snap election for mayor on May 25, it looks as though Leonid Chernovetsky, known locally as ‘Cosmic Lyonya' and ‘Mayor of the Martians', has held onto the post and is likely to retain control of Kiev City Council.
The Electoral Commission will spend the next few days counting the ballot papers. Although the ballot papers were a metre long, the names of the more than 70 candidates hardly fitted onto them. But the general picture is clear, particularly as we know that the main political players will not be challenging the results in the courts.
With more than half the ballot papers now counted Mayor Chernovetsky has cornered 37% of the votes. His closest rivals were Alexander Turchinov (a colleague of Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko) with 18%, and the former world boxing champion Vitaly Klichko with 17%. Viktor Pilipishin from the Litvin bloc took 6% and Nikolai Katerinchuk 4%. Vasily Gorbal from the Party of the Regions and former mayor of Kiev Alexander Omelchenko both got 2% of the vote. Omelchenko is the man whose passion for building underground shopping centres when he was mayor earned him the local nicknames ‘bulldozer' and ‘excavator.'
The only real surprise was Katerinchuk's good showing. He is the man who represented President Viktor Yushchenko's interests on the Central Electoral Commission in the Orange Revolution. His photographs were systematically plastered over the city. Although the other candidates occupied more than half of the advertising space in the Ukrainian capital, their efforts were overwhelmed by Katerinchuk. Mayor Chernovetsky was rumoured to have paid Katerinchuk's costs, in the hope of drawing votes away from Vitaly Klichko.
In the voting for the City Council, the Chernovetsky bloc took the lead with 29%, followed by Yulia Timoshenko's bloc with 23%. The Klichko and Litvin factions got 10% each. The Party of the Regions came in with around 4%. The Katerinchuk bloc is teetering around the 3% threshold, but will probably just make it. The pro-presidential Our Ukraine-Self Defence (NUNS) received just over 1% of the vote.
All this means that in order to secure a majority on Kiev City Council, Chernovetsky will have to go public on his intimate relations with Katerinchuk. He will also have to reach agreement with Litvin and try to win over part of the Klichko bloc. He will have to act fast because the Yulia Timoshenko bloc will also be doing its best to win Klichko's supporters to their side.
The Party of the Regions will not formally support Chernovetsky. But in one way or another it will help him fend off the Yulia Timoshenko bloc, which is now in a position to be able to build a strong opposition in the City Council. Timoshenko could end up benefiting from this if she has to step down as Prime Minister. For as head of her bloc's list, she too can be congratulated on her election to the Kiev City Council.
Dirty, but dull
The presidential campaign will get underway in Ukraine next year. Those in the know suggest that snap elections to parliament are also on the cards. The Kiev elections suggest what we are to expect. This was a noisy campaign, with open attempts to buy votes. But voter turnout was barely 50 percent. Assuming that voters do vote with their feet, the people of Kiev had nothing good to say to their politicians.
The Litvin, Klichko, Timoshenko and Katerinchuk blocs will all be suspected of having bought votes and will end up facing long and ultimately fruitless court proceedings. Chernovetsky is in the clear on this count because everyone knows his voters: elderly women, those who love free food handouts and members of the religious cult known as ‘the Embassy of God'. Other candidates are alleged to have paid up to $100 per vote and come up with fraudulent schemes that not even Ukrainian security officials could untangle.
Last week, Viktor Medvedchuk, former chief of staff in Leonid Kuchma's administration, was called in and asked if he knew anything about ‘Babylon,' some furtive scheme dreamed up by Russian political fixers. No one explained to the voters of Kiev what ‘Babylon' was all about. But as a means of buying votes it appears to have worked like this: you sent off an MMS with a photo of the ballot paper, and when you asked a particular person at your polling station for a ticket you got given the address of the place where you could collect your money. These people at the polling stations were posing as employees of some public opinion research company carrying out an exit poll. So a number of genuine Ukrainian sociologists working on the elections must also have ended up with the finger of suspicion pointing at them.
Competing in idiocy
As for the campaign itself, the candidates lapped the track in cretinous creativity. For instance, Yury Lutsenko, the ostensible leader of NUNS, announced on May 23 that NUNS and the Yulia Timoshenko bloc were uniting behind a single candidate, Alexander Turchinov. But next day it turned out that Lutsenko was lying and that NUNs had made no such decision. Since NUNS failed to make it into the Kiev City Council, Lutsenko will doubtless face the axe from his party colleagues.
Turchinov's campaign ads and posters all featured the shining image of Yulia Timoshenko, embracing her colleague as if to say to the people of Kiev, ‘Look what a fine fellow I'm offering you'. The sanest advertising came from Chernovetsky, who kept things simple and focused on buses, hospitals, cheap bread and other issues of concern to the city.
The nationalists took part in the campaign too. Although they did not stand together, various far-right groups ended up plastering exactly the same slogan (‘Ukrainskuyu vladu -v Kievskuyu Radu') over their billboards, plus shots of their smirking leader posing against views of the city. Nikolai Katerinchuk began with the slogan ‘shameful' in blue letters, then moved on to offering pictures of himself over the slogan ‘Here's a mayor we won't be ashamed of'. Katerinchuk's advertising campaign began in Kiev back in March when, riding on the March 8 Women's Day holiday, Katerinchuk, leering like a pimp, congratulated Ukrainian women with being ‘the best in Europe'.
All in all, the result of the campaign was to leave the people of Kiev feeling even more sick of the elections than they had expected. The lack of real choice; the idiocy of the candidates, the meaninglessness of it all and the absence of confidence-inspiring candidates, drained Ukrainian politics of its last hope.
With the country still locked in a drawn-out political crisis, Ukraine's politicians are slowly but surely reaching the point of no return; the moment when voters will write on their ballot papers: ‘Thanks, but no thanks - we're fed up.'
