• English Site
• > Under the Scope

Election in Ukraine

Opposition Leader Yushchenko Wins Presidency

It took three elections, but this time it appears opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko has finally won Ukraine's presidential election. But he faces countless challenges ahead. His opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, has entered an official complaint of election fraud and Yushchenko will be taking the reins of a land more divided than ever before.

This time it looks like Ukraine may finally have gotten it right. Following Sunday's re-do of Ukraine's presidential election runoff, opposition challenger Viktor Yushchenko took to Kiev's Independence Square and claimed victory before tens of thousands of demonstrators.

Even the Ukraine Central Election Commission, which appeared to show a bias toward Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in the Nov. 21 election, is officially stating a substantial lead for Yushchenko. With over 98 percent of the votes counted, the official tally is 52.3 percent for Yushchenko versus 43.9 percent for Yanukovych with exit polls showing a gap of as much as 20 percentage points. Election turnout was 77.2 percent.

"I want to say this is a victory of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian nation. ... Today we became free. This is the beginning of a new epoch, the beginning of a new great democracy," Yushchenko told reporters in his Kiev campaign headquarters on Monday. Later, addressing the masses in central Kiev, he had to fight down chants of "YU-SHCHEN-KO" before saying, "my first thanks is to you. The people proved their power. They rebelled against probably the most cynical regime in Eastern Europe."

Riding a wave of protest

The vote was the re-run of the Nov. 21 run-off election that saw massive vote manipulation and ballot-box stuffing -- fraud which resulted in official results showing a victory for the government-supported candidate Yanukovych despite exit polls that indicated a clear triumph for Yushchenko. The rigged election triggered two weeks of enormous demonstrations in Kiev and other large cities in Ukraine -- protests that ended when the Ukrainian Supreme Court threw out the election results on Dec. 3 and ordered the new poll held on Sunday.

Some 12,000 foreign election observers were on hand this time to help prevent a repeat of the fraud that torpedoed the Nov. 21 vote. Nevertheless, both sides have grumbled of irregularities, and Yanukovych on Monday presented more than 550 complaints to the Election Commission. The prime minister also refused to concede victory to Yushchenko and said he would challenge the results in the Ukraine Supreme Court. The final report from the election observer team sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has not yet been completed, but monitors say that, despite the complaints, there were far fewer problems this time around.

"This is another country," German observer Stefan Mironjuk told the Associated Press. "The atmosphere of intimidation and fear during the first and second rounds was absent. ... It was very, very calm."

Yushchenko promises to fight corruption

Yushchenko's overwhelming victory puts him in a position to start in on the complete overhaul of Ukraine's political landscape he promised during his campaign. He is hoping to capitalize on the deep-seated disgust many people feel for the outgoing government of President Leonid Kuchma -- a government associated with widespread corruption, economic mismanagement, oppression of the media and the abuse of state power.

Yushchenko, 51, has promised to thoroughly modernize the economy and has also pledged to wage a hard-hitting war against corruption, particularly singling out the so-called oligarchs, business tycoons who wield tremendous political and economic power in Ukraine. Indeed, during an earlier stint as Prime Minister from Dec. 1999 to May 2001, Yushchenko gained a reputation for standing up to industrialists and was thrown out of office following confrontations with coal and gas industry leaders.

Yushchenko has also promised to orient Ukraine more towards the European Union and to the West while, at the same time, maintaining close ties with Russia. The divisive campaign -- which saw Russian President Vladimir Putin throw his support behind Prime Minister Yanukovych and Russian accusations that Yushchenko was little more than a Western-controlled puppet -- promises to make the Russia-Ukraine cooperation difficult, but Yushchenko said on Monday that the first foreign trip of his presidency will be to Moscow. Putin has likewise said he is willing to work with Yushchenko. One of the first campaign pledges the new Ukranian leader is expected to act on is his promise to remove Ukrainian troops from Iraq.

Inheriting a divided land

Another daunting challenge for Yushchenko will be to heal the internal rift that months of bitter campaigning have left behind in Ukraine -- a campaign that included a dioxin poisoning of Yushchenko that almost killed him and left behind grotesque lumps and dark patches on his face. An approaching referendum in Eastern Ukraine that seeks greater economic autonomy for the region has raised the specter that the region may withhold vital tax revenues. And economic corruption is so deep seated that it is unclear whether Yushchenko -- with reduced presidential powers agreed to as part of the compromise that cleared the way for the Dec. 26 runoff re-vote -- will be able to be effective in seeking to fulfill his anti-corruption promises.

Holding together the opposition coalition that propelled him to power may also prove difficult for Yushchenko. A position for the fiery opposition politician Yulia Tymoshenko, who proved one of Yushchenko's most valuable allies during the protests, must be found and Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz, who allied himself with Yushchenko on condition of political reform measures, must also be placated.

Ironically, Yushchenko's biggest challenge may be one of his own making: Will he be able to dampen the huge expectations of the millions of supporters who swept him into office? After all, the country's needed reforms won't happen overnight. To his supporters, Yushchenko embodies hopes for higher salaries, greater freedom of travel, more international respect and a solution to the massive corruption that has plagued the Ukrainian economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.

For now, however, Yushchenko and his supporters can finally bask in the glow of a hard-fought victory.

"Of course we have put our hopes in Yushchenko," 57-year-old Lyudmila Nikitina told the Associated Press, "because for so long now, Ukraine needed such a leader, someone who could take us down a correct, European and democratic path. We found him in Yushchenko, but we also found that some of those qualities are in all of us. So we know our future is not just in Yushchenko's hands, but also in our own."