Ukraine's Orange Revolution

Adrian Karatnycky

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005

Summary:  The electoral triumph of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and the victory of the Ukrainian people over their country's corrupt leadership represent a new landmark in the postcommunist history of eastern Europe, a seismic shift Westward in the geopolitics of the region. But what will come next for the new president--and the rest of the former Soviet Union?

Adrian Karatnycky is Counselor and Senior Scholar at Freedom House.

A key role in the process was played by parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, Kuchma's former chief of staff. While Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Lithuania's President Valdas Adamkus, and the European Union's Foreign Affairs Commissioner Javier Solana worked in Kiev to negotiate the contours of a democratic solution among the rival interests, Lytvyn brokered the specifics of a comprehensive agreement. It featured significant new protections in the election law to reduce the potential for voter fraud.

The agreement also called for amending the constitution to reduce the powers of the president. As a result of these changes, by the end of 2005, Ukraine will be a parliamentary-presidential republic; the president will be responsible for foreign policy, national defense, and security, with veto power over the legislature. The appointment of the government will now be the purview of the legislature, due to be newly elected in March 2006. Yushchenko accepted these changes with some reluctance, but most of his key aides believe that the remaining one-year window of strong presidential power will give him sufficient time to deal with the legacies of corruption and to shape a broad future parliamentary majority.

On December 26, Ukrainians went to the polls for the third time to vote for president in an election that attracted the largest contingent of international observers in history: more than 12,000 monitors from Europe, North America, Russia, and Asia took part. A more open media covered the election (although not in eastern Ukraine, where broadcast media continued to provide only a pro-Yanukovich perspective). The result was predictable: Yushchenko received 52 percent of the votes and Yanukovich 44 percent, with a winning margin of 2.2 million votes out of 28 million cast. The results showed significant regional variations: Yushchenko carried 17 regions in the western, central, and northeastern parts of the country, and Yanukovich commanded dominant majorities in Ukraine's ten southern and eastern regions.

Early in the morning on December 27, barely six hours after the polls had closed, Yushchenko made a brief, eloquent address to the nation. "We are free. The old era is over. We are a new country now," he said. Yushchenko declared what everyone knew, that he was Ukraine's third president since independence. But he was the first with a record of commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

FROM PROTESTS TO POLITICS

As president, Yushchenko faces serious domestic and international challenges. But his leadership team is far from inexperienced in governing. Many of Yushchenko's ministers have served in high government posts, dismissed only when they challenged the corrupt elite. As a result, his colleagues both know how to run bureaucracies and understand how to overcome resistance to reform.

Yushchenko's coalition is broad and highly representative, although also susceptible to some infighting and division. Some were long-time members of the opposition to Kuchma, while others made common cause with oligarchic parties until a few years ago. Some are members of Ukraine's nouveau riche, while others are civic activists deeply suspicious of the "new oligarchs." Some belong to the social-democratic left, while others are free-market libertarians. Some are conservative nationalists, while others are liberal and secular. To shape a majority in the short term, Yushchenko will also have to form alliances with politicians who until a few weeks ago backed his opponent and the ruling regime.

In part due to his religious convictions, Yushchenko has positioned himself as a member of the European People's Party (the Christian Democrats), a moderate center-right group. On social policy matters he tends to support a robust safety net for Ukraine's elderly, but he is an equally strong proponent of fiscal discipline. These three currents and his desire to balance them have contributed both to his centrist moderation and to his broad-based political appeal.

His team's biggest challenge will include confronting the corrupt, criminal legacy of the Kuchma years. Doing so will require introducing a significant number of new cadres into the upper and middle levels of the Ukrainian state government. It will likely mean wholesale changes in the Interior Ministry and the tax inspectorate, which have devolved into mere political instruments of the oligarchic groups. Yushchenko will replace the country's governors and local executive officials, all of whom are loyalists of Kuchma and the large oligarchic parties. In the wake of the orange revolution, appointed regional leaders from Ukraine's Russian-speaking east came perilously close to threatening secession. They will now certainly be replaced, and some who have resigned are already under investigation by the prosecutor-general's office for anticonstitutional activity.