With 5,966 candidates running for 424 seats either on party lists or in single-member districts, it’s hard to single out the defeat of any single legislator for special attention. But Ukraine would have been better off if Olena Sotnyk would have made it into parliament again.
The 36-year-old lawyer has been serving for the last five years as a member of parliament with the 25-seat faction Samopomich Party, a nationalistic and reformist grouping that was particularly popular in western Ukraine with Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi as its leader. But the party fractured, disintegrated and are now out of parliament. They didn’t get even 1 percent of the vote on July 21.
Sotnyk jumped party earlier and hitched her political wagon to ex-Security Service of Ukraine chief Ihor Smeshko’s Strength & Honor party, where she had the No. 2 position. However, Smeshko’s party also went down to defeat, falling short of the 5 percent minimum needed to win representation in the Verkhovna Rada.
It was an awful Election Day for Euro-Optimists like her, part of the young generation of pro-Western politicians who came to power following the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Sotnyk is certainly a Euro-Optimist by temperament and has her ideas about what went wrong with others of similar beliefs who will also mostly no longer be in parliament. This contingent once included a formidable list of lawmakers, albeit scattered in different parties (and that was part of the problem): Mustafa Nayyem, Sergii Leshchenko, Svitlana Zalishchuk, Oksana Syroyid, Victoria Voytsitska, Natalia Katser-Buchkovska, Alex Ryabchyn, Hanna Hopko and more. It looks like all of them will soon be ex-lawmakers; Hopko and Nayyem didn’t even run.
“I had the feeling that we’re going to make this and, of course, I’m disappointed,” Sotnyk told me on July 22. “With this parliament, it would be hard to continue some reforms which were important for me. I hope that now more experienced and pro-Ukrainian new politicians from the Rada will learn from their mistakes and could set up together a real national party and involve Ukrainians to participate in its building and development.”
Why did the incumbent Euro-Optimists lose so badly? Simply, personal agendas and ambitions won out over common sense and shared sacrifice to achieve greater goals, she said. “I had this answer more than two years ago when I couldn’t succeed to push our general agenda over personal agendas,” she said.
Personally, Sotnyk will be fine. She will study at Yale University in America as part of its World Leaders Program. Her focus will be studying how to lead a nation when the world order is changing. “Mainly how to be effective and manage the challenges,” she said.
Why do she and other one-term lawmakers like her stand out?
She was among the relentless critics of Ukraine’s distrusted judicial system and she pushed hard for a full reboot of police, prosecutors, and courts — measures stalled or blocked by ex-President Petro Poroshenko.
Why did Poroshenko and others in the ruling elite first oppose, then stall the creation of an independent anti-corruption court, which might finally start hearing cases only in September?
“Of course, they are afraid the anti-corruption court can be independent, qualified and rather transparent,” Sotnyk told the Kyiv Post in an interview published on Oct. 2, 2017. “We’ve been waiting for three years to see a result. If there would be any opportunity and capability of Ukrainian courts to take decisions and issue verdicts, we would see at least one or two or three. There are no results concerning this high-level corruption. It means there is no capacity and there is no will, and we are not going to get any verdicts.”
She had other priorities and interests, but the establishment of a truly independent and competent anti-corruption court seemed to ignite her public policy passions. In an op-ed published by the Kyiv Post on Sept 5. 2017, and headlined “How to finish the revolution in Ukraine,” she countered the myths of people who opposed an anti-corruption court.
In the Kyiv Post interview, she also blamed Ukraine’s oligarchs for obstructing the corruption fight and predicted problems for Poroshenko’s re-election chances in 2019.
“It’s the feeling we are not just going into the wrong direction, but that we are going to stay alone,” Sotnyk said. “Nobody is going to support Ukraine when the head of the country doesn’t want to do anything and is lying. Sorry, but it’s a lie to say the anti-corruption court is not going to work if you’re not even trying. It’s a matter of protecting his power or influence.”
She also saw problems with the new 120-member Supreme Court that she did not expect to be much different than the old one and also worried about the future of new anti-corruption agencies — the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. And, two years after her comments, all three agencies have shown no lasting results, partly because their powers have been limited and partly because their leaders have discredited the agencies, especially in the cases of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption.
Her criticism extended to Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who commands 15,000 prosecutors, and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who oversees 150,000 people in the National Guard and police.
Instead of focusing on solving “the most serious crimes against the state,” she said the non-lawyer Lutsenko behaves more like a politician. “He’s posting on Facebook, where he’s giving the results before any judges, before any court procedures, before anything, like he’s the court of the last instance,” she said. The prosecutor general “should first of all be a lawyer,” she said, which was one reason why “nothing has changed” in the work of prosecutors since the EuroMaidan Revolution.
She also had some choice words for Avakov, the nation’s top cop, who she said was motivated by wielding power rather than solving big crimes or transforming police.
“We have a huge problem with the criminal police, which is the main core of the department,” Sotnyk said. “Many of them make less than $200 a month, which is, if not an invitation for corruption, then an excuse not to do their jobs. They are not motivated at all.”
She also talked about the need to link the poor performance in the corruption fight with the inability of the nation to prosper, so that Poroshenko paid a political price for his obstinance.
That part of the strategy worked well, or well enough, as Poroshenko lost in a landslide to President Volodymyr Zelensky, 73% to 24%, on April 21.
