1994-2004 - President Leonid Kuchma
In July 1994, Leonid D. Kuchma was elected as Ukraine's second president in free and fair elections. During the Soviet Era, in the Ukrainian SSR, the so-called "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" included Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. After Leonid Kuchma was elected president, the "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" gradually regained power in Kyiv. At his first press conference Wednesday, the president-elect of Ukraine spoke in Ukrainian, rather than his native Russian, and disavowed any plan to make his country part of a resurgent "Russian empire." In symbol and substance, Leonid Kuchma's words were wisely aimed at healing divisions between anti-Russian nationalists in the western half of the country and the large Russian minority in the east. True, he had run promising to rebuild relations and economic ties with Russia. But as the man the voters elected to replace Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk, he wanted those voters to know that he isn't about to abandon the independence they overwhelmingly voted for in December 1991.
The election of Kuchma, a former prime minister and military-industrial manager, over Leonid M. Kravchuk, Ukraine's first elected-president and former Communist apparatchik, by a margin of 52 to 45 percent confirmed the deep regional cleavage within Ukrainian society between those who sought a unilateral, Ukrainian-national road and those who want closer economic and political ties with Russia. The vote breakdown underscored the regional dynamics with the east [large Russian minorities and Russified Ukrainians] joined by Crimea and Odessa in the south voting for Kuchma and close ties to Russia. In Central Ukraine, including the Kiev region, the electoral results were much closer with the balancing shifting between Kravchuk and Kuchma.
Ukraine’s March 1998 parliamentary resulted in the election of a parliament similar in composition to the previous parliament, albeit with a somewhat more Communist tilt. The left constituted about 40 percent of parliament’s membership, with the remainder a mix of centrists, independents and national democrats. The new parliament included many new faces -- only 141 deputies from the old parliament were in the new one. The parliamentary elections were held under a new election law which replaced the majoritarian system, introducing a mixed electoral system where half of the 450 deputies are elected from single-mandate districts and half from national party lists. While there were violations, transgressions and irregularities during the campaign and voting, Ukrainian voters generally were able to express their political will freely, and the results of the elections do appear to reflect the will of the electorate.
Kuchma was reelected in November 1999 to another five year term, with 56 percent of the vote. International observers criticized aspects of the election, especially slanted media coverage, however, the outcome of the vote was not called into question. The 1999 elections delivered a pro-Presidential, and ostentatiously pro-reform, majority in the Rada (parliament), ending temporarily the parliamentary blockade which had stalled reform for most of the 1990s.
In January 2000, a center-right pro-presidential majority was formed, breaking the left's traditional control over the legislature. This produced, for the first time since independence, a degree of cooperation among the president, prime minister and parliament, which resulted throughout most of 2000 in an improved atmosphere for the passage of reform legislation.
Ukraine was in political turmoil since the release of secretly recorded audio tapes in November 2000, with the President’s voice apparently ordering his Interior Minister to “get rid” of Mr Georgy Gongadze, an opposition journalist. Several days prior to the release of the tapes by one of President Kuchma’s security guards, Mr Gongadze’s decapitated body was found in a forest outside Kyiv, two months after his disappearance. Apart from the reference to Mr Gongadze, the conversations contained on the tapes suggested Presidential involvement in judicial manipulation and electoral fraud. Since then, President Kuchma has acknowledged that it is his voice on the recordings, but has adamantly denied any wrongdoing claiming that the recorded conversations are a fabrication. However, this has not placated a broad and vocal anti-Kuchma opposition, the National Salvation Front, which was formed in February by a wide range of political leaders. This union has demanded the President’s resignation and launched a series of protests, some of which have been crushed by the police. As its rallying point, the National Salvation Front used the figure of Yulia Tymoshenko, former deputy Prime Minister, who was arrested in January 2001 on corruption charges.
