Bracing for Election Day Hijinks in Ukraine
MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — For a preview of the upcoming Ukrainian presidential election, one might examine what happened when this scenic town in the Carpathian Mountains tried to elect a mayor.
After the polls closed, city officials locked the doors at the election commission. Four hours later, they emerged with official results that bore little resemblance to the counts called in from the polls. Thugs later stole so many ballots that no recount was possible. Parliament deputies who tried to intervene were beaten and tossed down the stairs. One candidate's car was blown up. The proclaimed winner finally resigned after receiving threats.
"Very rough and bad things happened in Mukachevo," said President Leonid D. Kuchma's former spokesman, Oleksandr Martynenko, who heads the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. "Everybody's interested now in the question of whether we will repeat Mukachevo on the scale of Ukraine. I doubt it is possible."
Then again, in this sprawling republic that has long formed the turbulent border between Europe and Russia, almost anything seems possible.
If Russia has moved slowly to shake off the authoritarianism, corruption and brawling capitalism that accompanied the transition from the Soviet era, Ukraine has moved hardly at all.
Powerful oligarchic cabals control much of the government, and their leaders hold seats in parliament. Lucrative state industries have been sold off at a fraction of their values while millions of Ukrainians live on minimal wages.
Both national television stations are controlled by Kuchma's chief of staff, Viktor Medvedchuk, and journalists who look too closely under the rug have been attacked with baseball bats, shot at or found hanging from their refrigerator doors. Radio Continent journalist Giorgi Gongadze was beheaded in 2000, and evidence increasingly points to the security services.
A court ruled in December that Kuchma, whose popularity hovers around 7%, could run again despite a two-term limit. Facing an international outcry, the president has pledged he will not be a candidate in the Oct. 31 race. Instead, Kuchma is pushing a plan to transfer power from the president to the parliament and is tentatively backing Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who is tough enough to be a politician even in Ukraine. In his youth, Yanukovich twice served prison terms for assault. (He says he took the rap, both times, for a friend.)
