Ukraine Crisis Fosters New Political Breed

(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Volodymyr Verbyany – October 23, 2014) Andriy Teteruk had just returned from fighting as a volunteer battalion leader in eastern Ukraine when he received an invitation from Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to run for parliament on his People’s Front ballot.

“I also got proposals from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party,” Teteruk, 41, a former policeman who escaped encirclement during the August offensive of pro-Russian separatists, said in an interview in Kiev. “I realized that fortune gave me a chance and I must use it.”

Ukraine’s upheaval is creating opportunities for a new generation of politicians like Teteruk in the Oct. 26 general elections, even as voters remain skeptical about the extent to which the old political class will be swept away. War heroes, Maidan activists, leaders of non-government organizations and journalists renowned for fighting corruption are all running for election to the Verkhovna Rada.

Standoff in Ukraine

The yearlong crisis has wiped out or marginalized the monolithic parties that dominated the country’s electoral landscape in the past decade, when ballots were episodes of the struggle between the Party of Regions of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party.

Party of Regions collapsed after Yanukovych’s flight. Much of its former support base is in Crimea, annexed by Russia in March, and in eastern Ukraine, where voting will be hindered by a pro-Russian insurgency that has raged for months. Tymoshenko, a key figure in the Orange revolution that blocked Yanukovych’s rise to the presidency in 2004, is fighting to clear the 5 percent threshold.

Soldiers, Activists

New parties seeking to fill the political void have sought to capture a public mood for change by naming candidates who became prominent during the protests on Kiev’s Independence Square, known as Maidan, or in the conflict in the east.

The Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, which is leading in opinion polls, includes on its list Colonel Yuliy Mamchur, the air force commander whose defiance of Russian troops at his base in Balbek, Crimea, gained global attention in March. Reporters Serhiy Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayem are also near the top of the party’s list.

The Radical Party, polling second, has named volunteer battalion commanders Serhiy Melnychuk, Artem Vitko, Dmytro Linko and Maidan activist Artem Zapototsky as candidates. Tymoshenko put herself second on her party’s list, behind Nadiya Savchenko, a Ukrainian pilot held prisoner in Russia.

No Shevchenko

The faces of war are replacing popular actors, singers, and sportsmen like soccer star Andriy Shevchenko, who ran in the 2012 parliamentary vote for the Ukraine Forward party. The commanders rose to the forefront as polls showed that among institutions trusted by Ukrainians, the National Guard has reached the Church’s level and the army is next to it, said Iryna Bekeshkina, head of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Kiev.

“About 70 percent of Ukrainians are tired of voting for old faces, according to recent polls,” Bekeshkina said by phone. “Famous football players don’t do it any more.”

Even so, many established politicians are still on the ballots. Their presence makes some voters “skeptical about their chances of changing Ukraine,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst at the Penta research institute in Kiev.

New Wave

“I see this generation as a new wave,” Fesenko said by phone. “I’m not sure they will be able to change the system, but they will begin this process.”

Boris Kolesnikov, one of Party of Regions’ leading figures, told reporters in Kiev in September that it wouldn’t contest the elections because “about 7 million voters in the country’s southeast, covered by the unrest, can’t vote.”

Poroshenko’s group has 30 percent support among decided voters, compared with 13 percent for the Radical Party and 11 percent for the People’s Front, according to an Oct. 9-18 poll by the Democratic Initiatives Fund and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party polled at 7.5 percent and the Opposition Bloc formed by Yanukvych allies at 6 percent in the survey of 2,025 people, which had a margin of error of less than 2.2 percentage points and showed 32 percent of the people were undecided.

Yields Steady

Ukraine bonds halted their rise today, with the yield on dollar notes maturing in July 2017 little changed at 14.68 percent today by 11:08 a.m. in Kiev. The yield fell 163 basis points in the previous four trading days from record high, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Even if a lot of veteran politicians will be back, the influx of new blood may help bring a change to Ukraine’s often acrimonious politics, according to Bekeshkina at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

“These new faces will be an absolute minority, but they are brave,” she said. “One can hardly say if military chiefs will be good lawmakers, but at least they are noble.”

Teteruk, the former battalion leader, is determined to make his presence felt if he’s elected and is counting on working with other former volunteer battalion leaders in parliament.

We will “not let our soldiers, alive and killed, feel ashamed,” he said.

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