Public trust in Ukraine’s presidential candidates is low and, for front-runner Yulia Tymoshenko, it may be the lowest.
Tymoshenko appears to be aware of the problem.
While no one asked her about the trust issue during her two-hour talk with the business audience on Feb. 4, she still decided to address it, on her own initiative.
Tymoshenko, the ex-prime minister who with President Petro Poroshenko and comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy are leading contenders in the presidential race, told the crowd not to believe all the terrible things they hear about her.
“I’m not eating babies for breakfast,” she said before leaving the stage.
Her need to address her credibility underscores one of her vulnerabilities, despite consistently coming in first or second place in the pre-election polls ahead of the March 31 vote. Those same poll results contain bad news as well, showing sky-high negative ratings. Many people simply dislike her and don’t trust her. Others are undecided.
The reasons are numerous and historical for the 58-year-old candidate.
Some will never forgive and forget her days as a gas-trading protégé for convicted ex-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko in the 1990s, when she made millions of dollars off the corrupt racket at the expense of impoverished Ukrainians.
Others recall how she and President Viktor Yushchenko fought constantly from 2005-2010, and her role in giving billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky a sweet deal to buy oil at a cut-rate from state-owned Ukrnafta.
And still more remember her anti-democratic political dalliance with ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, who ended up imprisoning her anyway for more than two years before he fled the EuroMaidan Revolution on Feb. 22, 2014.
And today, the sources of her current wealth remain mysterious, fueling even more suspicions about her honesty.
Front-running candidate
Whatever it is, Tymoshenko leaves a trail of reasons why some people have a hard time believing her.
But the fact that she could still win the presidency, despite her drawbacks, shows how fed up and distrusting Ukrainians are of Poroshenko’s five-year run, which hasn’t put much of a dent in corruption.
Tymoshenko is tapping into popular discontent with a program of dramatic changes that she outlined to 250 people and journalists at the Feb. 4 event in the InterContinental Kyiv, organized by the 1,000-member European Business Association.
“Cosmetic changes are not going to help,” she said, summarizing her “New Economic Course” and her call for a new Constitution.
Presidents have too much power
She pledged that, as president, she would break the monopoly of presidential power and introduce checks and balances as well as a stronger parliamentary system of governance.
She said that no branch of power faces any independent oversight, which leads to a lack of accountability.
“We’re No. 1 in Europe in corruption,” she said. “The system does require deep changes.”
She said Ukraine’s president still has too much control over the judiciary, prosecutors and police.
“I’m quite aware how the judges are appointed,” she said. “The judiciary is still in the pocket of the ruling political team,” she said, and consequently serves the “corrupt ruling class.” She said she will break the “umbilical cord” between courts and the president, and introduce truly independent judicial oversight to get rid of corrupt and incompetent judges.
She also said that decentralization is not being properly done, and pledged to shift authority and money to localities.
Fundamentally, she said that Ukraine made a mistake by dividing executive powers between the president and prime minister. She called it “dualism in government.”
New Constitution
That’s why her first six months of power, she said, will be spent conducting a referendum for a new Constitution in Ukraine. She wants the changes made before the October parliamentary elections because she wants to drop the corruption-rife geographic single mandate districts for a strictly proportional system.
She also said that Ukraine needs the ability to impeach a president for misconduct, something it doesn’t have now in practice because of subservient courts.
“If God and country will give this opportunity for me to become president, I want us to totally change the old system of government and adopt a new constitution where presidential powers will be balanced. I believe in the parliamentary form of government.”
Currently, she said, only 60-70 out of 422 members of parliament are not participating in corruption, by her estimates. (Of course, the minority, in her view, includes the 20 members in her Batkivshchyna party faction.)
Without these radical changes, she says Ukraine faces five more years of corruption and stagnation. Ukraine needs to stop looking for a “new czar” or “new czarina,” she said, and create a system of governance that is based on balance of powers, strong and independent institutions and inclusiveness.
When asked who she would rather face in the April 21 runoff vote, Zelenskiy or Poroshenko, she said she is hoping for a first-round win on March 31. As of now, it’s unlikely to happen. She’d need more than 50 percent to win in the first round, yet the 2019 polls give her around 18 percent of support.
Warnings of voter fraud
In other appearances on Feb. 4, she warned of Poroshenko-orchestrated voter fraud and vote-buying while asking the National Association for the Prevention of Corruption to open a corruption investigation against the president.
She accused Poroshenko, with a net worth close to $1 billion, of increasing his income “82 times” in the last year “while the people live in extreme poverty, and some of his income came from him lending his personal money at interest during the war. This is unacceptable,” she said.
Poroshenko’s press service said she’s lying.
How to end Russia’s war
As for getting Russia to call off its war, Tymoshenko said that the Minsk peace agreements aren’t working and pledged to find ways to get signatories to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum — including Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom — to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the return of the Crimean peninsula.
“Minsk was dead from Day 1,” she said of the twin agreements that Russia accepted but ignored following catastrophic battlefield losses by Ukraine in Illovaisk in 2014 and Debaltseve in 2015.
Ultimately, she said, “Ukraine has to show economic and political success” to regain Crimea and lost parts of the eastern Donbas now under the Kremlin’s control.
But her focus was on domestic politics, saying Ukraine needs a “great new architecture of government” to break monopolies, establish property rights, reduce the shadow economy, broaden the tax base, attract foreign direct investment and rid the nation of corruption.
End monopolies
Tymoshenko has been under fire for criticizing hikes in natural gas prices to market levels. But she counters by saying that, while she is for market pricing in all areas, it works only when there are not monopoly suppliers and producers, which she said exist in the energy sector today.
“We should not be calling a monopoly a market,” she said. The state-owned monopoly “Naftogaz is not a market.”
She said Poroshenko is lying when he says Ukraine is not buying gas from Russia. She said that Russian gas is sent to other countries and then re-purchased by Ukraine. Once she stops “sending gas in circles,” she said, the true price will become known and it will be lower than the price today.
To boost production, she pledged to end the monopoly on corruption and licensing by “Poroshenko’s friends,” and attract “real producers” who will tap into Ukraine’s untapped natural gas reserves, estimated to be as high as 1 trillion cubic meters. She said that “we will have market prices for gas,” and it will not be higher than $100 to $110 per 1,000 cubic meters.
The same applies to efforts to create an agricultural land market and end the moratorium on purchases and sales of land. She said that 10 families in the nation are controlling 70 percent of the agricultural land in the nation, effectively monopolizing the market. She said the land monopoly needs to be broken up and more support given to small-scale farmers.
Threat of ‘depopulation’
The shadow economy — which might be up to half of the official $120 billion annual economy — is creating a “huge tax burden for those who are paying taxes.”
Tymoshenko also called Ukraine’s shrinking population and exodus of people a national security threat even more acute than Russia’s war.
“Depopulation is even bigger challenge than the war, she said. “Each year about 1 million go to work abroad.”
Ukraine’s disparity between its birth rate and death rate causes it to lose another 200,000 people yearly, she said.
She said she will be open to taking any qualified people onto her presidential team, but singled out some of her loyalists, such as Hryhoriy Nemyria, her top foreign policy adviser, by name. He will likely become foreign minister. As for other appointments, Tymoshenko named Vitaliy Lomakovich, founder of the Optima think tank who is a financial and economic adviser, she said.
Tymoshenko told Anna Derevyanko, executive director of the EBA, that she will know she’s succeeding as president when “people stop leaving Ukraine and EBA stops complaining.”
She tried to instill a sense of urgency with the crowd.
“We have no time to experiment,” she said.
