Unsurprisingly, Viktor Yanukovich has lost the presidential elections in Ukraine, which was fairly predictable. The agreement concluded under the patronage of current President Leonid Kuchma indicated that the entire bureaucratic apparatus, with its financial and organizational opportunities, had taken Yushchenko's side and was working hard to ensure his victory.
There were more than serious reasons for this. The developments of late fall and early winter showed that it is not the Yushchenko team that poses a threat to stability in Ukraine, as, like Yanukovich, he was not a bad prime minister. The threat came and still comes from Yulia Timoshenko, the leader of the radical opposition.
There are supporters of Yushenko, Yanukovich and Timoshenko as well as other groups among Ukraine's bureaucrats. But the common threat for all of them is the real, not symbolic, participation of Ms. Timoshenko and other radicals in state management. Radicals are good at destroying but they can't build or rule. They have said enough about "corruption and dictatorship" in Kiev to scare away officials of any level and any convictions. A state, whatever it is like, cannot be governed from among a crowd of protesters. Economy, regardless of its model and orientation, does not work without a steady hand and law observance. Let alone the corruption charges that faced Timoshenko and her former patron, Pavel Lazarenko, a former prime minister, who is now serving his sentence in a US prison. In such circumstances, radicals have nothing to lose, and therefore, they are too dangerous.
Hence, the next few months will be not so much revolutionary in Ukraine but rather involve apparatus games, when professionals of intrigues in the corridors of power will hand over real levers of power to other professionals headed by Yushchenko and force out street fighters. The latter will certainly try to devaluate all the agreements between Yanukovich, Yushchenko and Kuchma and may seek adopting a new constitution with a fundamentally new government system.
The decisive factor in this struggle will be the conduct of investors and partners of the Ukrainian economy who are not interested in politics alone. The banking system should be in order, and its stability requires normal work of the eastern part of Ukraine, which accounts for the most of its GDP. This part of Ukraine provides metals and petrochemical products exported to Eastern Europe and China, the transport network and service. At issue is Eastern Ukraine that supported Yanukovich plus Kiev, the capital, accounting for the service sector, where the fate of the Yushchenko regime will be determined in the next few months. His task is to restore stability in the real and current economy rather than in the ideal and future economy that he promised to his voters.
As for the political aspect, the Ukrainian elections leave many questions for the countries that are both close and far away from Ukraine. Ukraine has come up with no fundamental innovations in terms of democratic mechanisms of a transitional democracy. Similar examples of voter behavior and that of businessmen, parties and the media in a similar society can be found in Russia, the Philippines and Taiwan as well.
However, nowhere else has the role of foreign observers been so strong. Since almost thousands of observers from Western Europe arrived in Ukraine to monitor the rerun of the second round, they will now share the responsibility during the probe into the violations during the elections that Yanukovich supporters demand. In any case, the phenomenon of international observers needs to be reviewed in the wake of the "Ukrainian episode."
Certainly, it would be absurd to speak about any unbiased approach of European observers now, after the Ukrainian developments. But Kiev is not the last world capital where presidential and parliamentary elections are held. Apparently, it would make sense to work out common rules for the entire world, stipulating the type of observers who should monitor elections, and the sort of elections they should monitor, as well as the real status and weight of their statements. On the whole, ways should be found to prevent observers from turning into a legalized support team for one of the candidates and thereby causing chaos in the election process that is far from ideal anyway.
