by Jonah Shepp
Steven Pifer surveys the political landscape in the lead-up to Sunday’s presidential elections in Ukraine:
In the final week before the vote, oligarch Petro Poroshenko appears to hold a commanding lead, polling over 30 percent. His nearest competitors, former Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and former banker Serhiy Tyhypko, each poll in single digits. If anything, Poroshenko’s lead has grown over the past two months, and it appears almost insurmountable. Some analysts project that Poroshenko will win outright on Sunday. That would require that he win virtually all of the undecided vote in the opinion polls. If he does win outright on Sunday, it would be a first for a Ukrainian presidential election; every previous election has gone to a run-off.
Whether or not the election is decided in one round or two, a democratic election process and clear winner will be a big plus for Ukraine. It will remove the cloud of illegitimacy that hangs over the government as seen in the eastern part of the country. It could give a boost to the OSCE-initiated roundtable process that seeks to promote a peaceful settlement of the country’s internal differences.
What would a Poroshenko presidency look like? Annabelle Chapman ponders the question:
Poroshenko has also vowed that one of his first moves will be to dismantle Ukraine’s oligarchic system.
He has pledged to get rid of the “uncompetitive, corrupt benefits” the old authorities created for “families” of businessmen and has promised “zero tolerance for corruption.” This is also a message to voters. In one recent poll, 51 percent of respondents put “untainted by corruption” at the top of the list of criteria they’d like to see in the country’s future president.
Needless to say, this is just what Ukraine needs — but these are strange words, coming from someone who made his career, and his fortune, in just the environment he now condemns. Eight years ago, when Poroshenko took a senior political position in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution, analyst Andreas Umland considered the ironies entailed by replacing old oligarchs with new ones. Fast-forward to 2014, and another revolution in Kiev, and that assessment remains current.
Daniel Berman analyzes Putin’s approach to the elections:
Putin’s changing behavior towards the elections reflects frustration over their outcome. At the time of the agreement with Yanukovych, Putin had reason to believe that a runoff between a Party of Regions-backed candidate and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was plausible. Such a runoff would have ensured that no matter who won, Putin would have a friendly face in Kiev. …
If either Tymoshenko or a Party of Regions candidate were to have a chance of victory, they would need the votes of the very Eastern Ukrainian regions were Pro-Russian separatists are threatening to disrupt voting, and where turnout will almost certainly be sporadic and low. Hence Putin’s decision to “release the hounds” in Donetsk and Luhansk indicates that has by and large given up any hope of a victory by either of them, and decided to proceed with other plans even if they would hurt the chances of his own proxies within the Ukraine.
Rajan Menon, on the other hand, expects Russia to be OK with a Poroshenko victory:
Petro Poroshenko will likely win the presidential poll. Yulia Tymoshenko will make a strong showing and continue playing an important part in politics. Neither has ever been aligned with Ukraine’s far right, the Kremlin’s bête noire. Both have a long history of dealing with Russia and are familiar figures to Moscow. Poroshenko, the “Chocolate King,” is a tycoon with substantial business interests in Russia and understands that Ukraine will be ill served by getting caught in a conflict spiral with Russia. And Putin knows that the next president won’t come from the Party of Regions, whose electoral base is in the Donbass, and that Poroshenko is a man with whom he can work.
The election will also help calm easterners’ fears about the right-wing nationalist parties and movements, particularly Right Sector and Svoboda, rooted in western Ukraine. It would be a big mistake for Kyiv and the West to dismiss these apprehensions as nothing more than the product of a Kremlin-run misinformation campaign (not that there hasn’t been one). A sensible policy toward the Donbass requires that they be taken seriously.
The Dish 