Gerard Kennedy

A Ukraine Election Reflection

Imagine an election process run by the political parties themselves with no independent referee.

Add in a razor’s edge margin between shifting coalitions within a few points of one another over the last several elections, which makes every single vote consequential.

That was Sunday’s presidential election runoff in Ukraine.

That was also the challenge for an estimated 3,700 international observers, including at least 280 Canadians, yesterday trying to cover 35,000 polls in 26 oblasts (provinces) in this country of 46 million.

It’s an election where the leading candidate didn’t show up for the only debate and parliament was convened a few days ago by one side to make a new set of laws on voting in time for Election Day.

The years-long seesaw of one group tilting East to Russia the other West to Europe is now overshadowed by a heavily hit economy and a comprehensive distrust of the integrity of institutions. (Ninety percent in a recent poll say hospitals are corrupt – and this is before a discussion of the corruption in courts, police, banks and politics.) Yet the grim context is belied by the mobilization of half a million dutiful citizens to stage the election themselves through national, regional and poll level committees and by a voter turnout higher than Canada’s last federal election.

The worn schools, factories and volleyball stadiums that are some of the polling sites are often freezing cold, yet precinct (poll) teams of 16 women and men sit for complete 15 hour shifts, and then sit in hallways of city halls waiting for hours more through the night to turn in their bulging bags of ballots and meticulous count protocols to the regional committee.

The enthusiasm of 2004’s Orange Revolution is not much evident in today’s Ukraine in the face of the failure of expectations of the standard bearers and a paralyzed parliament.

Even a short term visitor learns how just two of 20 local implement factories in the bread basket farming zone of Nivirograd oblast are open. You learn it is a society where mothers have to stay overnight with their children in the local sick kids hospital to ensure they have care (30 voted on site yesterday), particularly if they haven’t paid or can’t afford the informal “dues” that too many health care professionals collect in an ostensibly, but not in reality, free system. Where decrepit schools are regularly shut for their inability to withstand cold temperatures and where the schoolteachers get just $700 hrivini (less than $100 US) a month.

And yet there is optimism here. Everywhere one encounters the unflappable determination of the fur-hatted and Russian speaking over-40 crowd and the buoyant outlook of a newly globally-oriented youth who refuse to feel trapped in the societal gear-grinding all around them.

Where does the Ukrainian belief in a better tomorrow come from? The thought comes slowly through a variety of conversations: the citizens feel that they really are in charge of reinventing their society, regardless of the shenanigans and failures of those above them.

The orange revolution lives, it seems, underground.

Their humble ambition has already infected hundreds of individual Canadians, many of Ukrainian heritage, who have grown from short-term election observers into admirable long-term investors of their personal time, trouble and hope through impressive weeks-long deployments to help regulate the do-it-yourself election effort.

Admirable as the election mission is, the Ukrainian challenge is really an opportunity that cries out for constant, not intermittent, involvement.

Canadian governments, institutions , private companies and NGOs (not only Ukrainian-Canadian ones) need to be linked in a strategy to make us a helpful presence that will assist a turn-around for a country that is connected to one million Canadians, on the way to forging a mutually beneficial, special social and economic relationship.

My smart 23 year old translator Yulia tells me the inside joke here is that the only thing to answer a foreigner when they ask what’s new in Ukraine- “Well, we have another election.”

A new Canadian commitment founded on respect for the potential in Ukrainian society can help change that punchline, before Yulia loses hope.

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(As I write at 4 am from city hall in Kirovograd city, where this perspective was shaped over the past several days – I was also here for the parliamentary elections of 2007 – and with half votes reported, the tally is running 60% Tymoshenko, 34% Yanukovich and 4% none of the above. Across the country Yanukovich leads by 4% but the respective regional depths of candidates means it will be a day or more yet before a definitive outcome is known.)

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