“What would a Tymoshenko presidency mean?” This is the title of an article by political scientist Andreas Umland published by the Atlantic Council with respect to ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leading candidate in the March 31 presidential election.
There are seven key points that do not stand up to scrutiny.
Firstly, Umland believes opinion polls today are a true reflection of how Ukrainians will vote in the March 31, 2019, presidential election. Ukrainians often vote romantically in protest in the first round but then vote pragmatically in the second. If Tymoshenko faces Anatoliy Grytsenko or Andriy Sadovyi in the second round she could very well be defeated. If she faces Poroshenko in the second round, we cannot predict the outcome as this would depend on how many Ukrainians decided to (again) participate in negative voting.
The 2016 Brexit referendum in the U.K. and U.S. presidential elections have shown us that opinion polls can be a poor guide to outcomes. It is highly likely that many Ukrainian respondents use current opinion polls to vent their frustration at politicians and especially at the sitting president. Just because Tymoshenko is therefore in the lead today does not mean she will win the 2019 election.
Secondly, Tymoshenko has never promoted gender issues and hence her election would be only symbolic because she is a woman in a man’s world; but it would not signify a major step forward for women’s rights.
Thirdly, to suggest that President Tymoshenko could be an agent for change is to ignore her voting record and that of the Batkivshchina party she leads since the 2014 elections. Batkivshchina’s voting record on reforms has been very poor and Vox Ukraine rank it the lowest of the five ‘pro-European’ parliamentary factions. Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s Popular Front (NF) and the Petro Poroshenko bloc parliamentary factions have voted on 73-79 percent of occasions for reforms while Bartkivshchina has only voted in 52 percent of cases.
Of the heads of the eight Ukrainian parliamentary factions, Tymoshenko is ranked sixth, in 330th place, because she has only voted for reforms on 34 percent of cases. The heads of the NF and Poroshenko bloc factions have voted on 86-90 percent and the heads of the Radical Party and Samopomich factions have voted on 72-73 percent of occasions for reforms.
Fourthly, Tymoshenko will not improve relations with the West as she and Batkivshchina have been the most vocal in opposing IMF-supported reforms in every field ranging from pensions, healthcare, de-centralization, utility prices to land privatization. Tymoshenko’s populist billboard promise to reduce gas prices two-fold would require a return to using government subsidies or seeking Russian credits.
Tymoshenko is deceiving Ukrainian voters by claiming that the IMF and EU are different and therefore she can be against the former while supporting the latter. Financial assistance from the European Union and Western governments is dependent upon an International Monetary Fund agreement being put in place beforehand. All populists, whether in Ukraine, Europe and the US, are economical with the truth and Tymoshenko is no different.
Fifthly, Tymoshenko’s’ “New Deal” range of policies have been sharply criticized by experts at Vox Ukraine, especially on questions of economic reforms and the constitution. Tymoshenko’s “New Deal: constitutional proposals would push Ukraine away from the parliamentary systems in place throughout the EU and ‘The concentration of power would thus be on the par with the “super-presidential” Russia or Belarus. At the same time, a low election threshold would foster the fragmentation of the opposition.’
Sixthly, Tymoshenko has moved to the left in the last decade and her anti-IMF rhetoric and preference for state paternalism are closer to the ideology of socialist parties in Europe. Although Batkivshchina is a member of the center-right European Peoples Party it has nothing in common with conservative or especially Christian Democratic ideologies.
Seventh, Tymoshenko cannot reduce the influence of oligarchs when she, similar to all Ukrainian political parties is reliant upon financing from big business. Ihor Kolomoyskyy, for example, is on record saying he will back Tymoshenko and his 1+1 television channel, Ukraine’s most popular, is fiercely anti-Poroshenko. This alliance should come as no surprise because Kolomoyskyy has not given up on returning his control over the state oil company UkrNafta and Pryvat Bank which was nationalized in late 2016. Kroll investigative agency estimates that $5.5 billion was laundered through Pryvat Bank in 2006-2016.
On a final point, Umland does not mention a very important issue in Ukraine’s election which is that Ukrainians are electing not only a president but also a commander-in-chief at a time when Russia is waging and escalating its war against Ukraine. Would Ukrainians be willing to trust Tymoshenko as their commander-in-chief when she has never paid a single visit to the Donbas frontline over the five years of Putin’s war against Ukraine?
In most of Eurasia, it is known in advance who will win presidential elections. This not the case in Ukraine which is a young democracy – but nevertheless a democracy – where we cannot predict who will win the 2019 elections.
