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Ukraine Political Parties - 2014 Elections

The ideologies of most Ukrainian political parties are very vague, and many are little more than vehicles for their leading personality. Until the 2014 election, politics in Ukraine had been dominated by the same two or three parties and faces. Changes in mass conscience after the Euromaidan have not brought changes in conscience of key political players. It is clearly observed in the methods of electoral campaign which hardly underwent any transformations if to compare with previous parliamentary elections of 2012.

For the 2014 Rada election, nearly all leading political forces included ATO combatants and militaries in their lists. Most of them emphasized the need to restore the infrastructure of the destroyed regions. However, both politicians and the public had to reconsider not only the current situation but also ways for overcoming the ongoing social, psychological and economic crisis.

“Bloc of Petro Poroshenko” party [a classic party of power] decided not to reinvent the wheel and submitted a program which was almost identical to Petro Poroshenko’s program at the presidential elections. The Solidarity party congress renamed the political force as “Bloc of Petro Poroshenko” in August 2014. Poroshenko himself entered the room at that moment," Leshchenko said. The congress also elected ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko as party leader. The Central Election Commission (CEC) adopted a resolution on 26 September 2014 on the registration of candidates to people's deputies of Ukraine of the party Bloc of Petro Poroshenko in the national multi-member constituency.

The party promotes reform of law enforcement system (courts, police, prosecutor’s office, Security Service of Ukraine), Anti-trust committee becoming a key economic regulator and simplified taxation system for SME sector. Other priority tasks include anti-corruption lustration of courts, police, tax and customs agencies, public control over judges and professional corps of civil servants.

Narodnyi Front [People's Front] political party [another classic party of power] is led by Prime Minister Arsenii Yatsenyuk and Oleksandr Turchynov, a former acting President of Ukraine who remained Chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament. Both had been leaders of the political party Batkivshchyna (All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland") and a close associates of party leader Yulia Tymoshenko. But they started the new party People's Front in September 2014. The People’s Front recognized the Donbas conflict and Crimea’s annexation to be initiated and maintained by Russia, recognize Russia as aggressor..

Initially experts believed that Yatsenyuk's National Front would only win a few seats in parliament, whereas the main role in the Verkhovna Rada would be played by the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. However, the result of the prime minister's party became one of the sensations of the election.

Radical Party, led by talented populist Oleh Liashko/Lyashko, had as its symbol the pitchfork, the classic weapon of the wrath of the peasants against the oligarchs. It should not be a surprise that over half of supporters of the Radical Party live in rural areas. The Party had a program that was soaked with populism, being similar to bolsheviks’ slogans in 1917-1921. The main difference is that the word “bourgeois” was replaced with “oligarch”.

The program talked about protection of the countryside, nationalization of property of corrupt officials and oligarchs, and creation of guerilla units to fight Russia. The aim of Radical party is to create “society of equal opportunities and welfare state”. A public anti-corruption corps, which will react to citizens’ complaints, will fight corruption, and the staff of law enforcement agencies will be totally changed. The Radical Party acknowledged the fact of foreign aggression of Russia and internal reasons for the conflict, the need for the Eastern front, guerilla operations and “de-separatization”.

Oleh Lyashko initially focused on the people who were proponents of simple solutions. Due to his actions against the separatists, Lyashko moved to the status of a serious politician. The third best result of Oleh Liashko in the early presidential elections in 2014 was a great surprise. More than 8 percent of the electorate voted for him. Voters were attracted to this eccentric and rather strange Ukrainian politician, though just 18 months earliero his Radical Party gained a mere 1.08 percent of votes. Liashko absorbed most of the Ukrainian nationalist sentiments, the proof of which was his high rating and lukewarm support for Svoboda and Right Sector candidates.

In November 2014 Oleh Liashko's Radical Party joined the talks on the creation of a parliamentary coalition. By 04 November 2014 the parties had received written proposals from the Radical Party regarding supplements to the text of a coalition agreement.

Batkivschyna (“Fatherland”) All-Ukrainian Union leader Yulia Tymoshenko a two-times prime minister, came in a distant second place behind confectionery magnate Petro Poroshenko in the 2014 Presidential election. Her trademark peasant's hair braid and rhetoric had defined Ukrainian politics for a decade. The Fatherland called for conducting negotiation from the position of strength,recognize the conflict to be a war.

Samopomich [United Self-Help Party] took 11 percent of the vote, trailing behind only the bloc of President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's Popular Front, which took 21.8 and 22.2 percent respectively. There were some surprises in the October 2014 voting, with the main one being the results of the Self-Help party, which came in third. The party, which has declared “Christian morality and common sense” as its ideology, had recently become very popular with the media, although it was not listed among the favorites in this election.

The young political force called the Samopomich (Self-Help) Union, previously a local party headed by Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy, presented a partial list of its candidates on September 9. The second phase of its congress will be held before or on September 15. Somewhat surprisingly, it nominated as the first in the list a known civic activist, co-coordinator of the Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR) Hanna Hopko.

Self-Reliance was the only party to completely exclude seasoned politicians and entrepreneurs from its candidate list, The party had an especially strong showing in Sadovyy's native Lviv as well as the capital, Kyiv, where a politically energized demographic was seen as drawn to Self-Reliance's youthful profile.

It would be not easy to work after the extraordinary parliamentary election in the Verkhovna Rada, Lviv Mayor and parliamentary candidate on the list of Samopomich Union and the leader of the party Andriy Sadovy said. "It would be not easy to work during this parliament convocation, but I think that Samopomich dishes it out to many, and it will be interesting and constructive cooperation," he told reporters after casting his ballot in Lviv on 26 October 2014.

Ukrainian Prime Minister and People's Front leader Arseniy Yatseniuk presented to journalists on 29 October 2014 his draft agreement on the creation of a coalition in the future parliament. He saw the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko as a major strategic partner and also invited Batkivshchyna, Samopomich and Oleh Liashko's Radical Party to negotiations. He also said that he proposed naming the new coalition "European Ukraine." The head of the election headquarters of the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, MP Vitaliy Kovalchuk, said 04 November 2014 "we are ready to see the Peoples' Front, Samopomich Union, Batkivschyna and Liashko's Radical Party as partners of our party."

Svoboda (Freedom) All-Ukrainian Union led by Oleh Tyahnybok espouses an ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian agenda, and its critics say Svoboda is an anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi organization. Svoboda party supports building a strong military to resist any Russian incursions and to fight pro-Russian separatists. The Svoboda party was a force in the protests that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych earlier this year. In recent years it has won 10 percent of the seats in Ukraine's parliament. But the party stirs controversy with its pro-ethnic Ukrainian stances, conservative Christian views and past anti-Semitic statements. They started from far right and made some anti-Semitic and xenophobic statements, but, after 2004, Tyahnybok and his party moderated their views in recent years.

The Opposition Bloc includes a number of politicians who were previously members of Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions and who voted for the “dictatorial" laws passed during the height of protests in January 2014 to crack down on anti-government protests. The Opposition Bloc denies simply being a repackaged version of the Party of the Regions but similarities continue including centering its electorate in eastern Ukraine and using Kyiv’s opulent Inter-Continental Hotel for their press center. Though the Opposition Bloc out-performed pre-election expectations, it is but a shadow of the political force that the Party of Regions once was.

The Opposition Bloc acknowledged the need for a dialogue and negotiations with the RF, actually denying its key role of initiator and catalyst of the Donbas conflict. Earlier on, they demanded the status of the national language for Russian, whereas now, they prioritize the national status only for Ukrainian and a wider mandate of the regions to settle language and cultural policy issues.