Spinning the color wheel: constitutional reform in the Ukraine.

Over the last two years, Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe, has fallen off the radar of international news and events. For most of its post-Soviet history, Ukraine struggled to adapt to world markets while its nascent democracy provided a thin veneer for a self-serving political and economic elite. The tension between the centripetal pull of a resurgent Russia and the promise of new economic and political alliances with the West created a slow and equivocal path of development. The Orange Revolution of 2004 tipped this uneasy balance. Current president Viktor Yushchenko survived an assassination attempt and rode a powerful and unanticipated wave of large-scale protests to successfully challenge a blatantly fraudulent presidential election. Having wrested the presidency from the incumbent regime's anointed successor, Viktor Yanukovych, Yushchenko appeared poised to realize his pro-Western political platform. It was thus assumed that Ukraine had broken free of pseudo-democracy and Russian neo-colonialism, the two arms of its heavy yoke.

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This lofty expectation was never realized. Not surprisingly, a single act--no matter how symbolically powerful--could not repair a dysfunctional political ethic. What Ukraine needs above all are not new political players, but new rules for the political game itself. Restructuring Ukraine's political culture will take time and considerable effort. In the long term, this change will be contingent upon serious constitutional reform.

The Aftermath

The Orange Revolution carried significance well beyond Ukraine. It was heralded as a dramatic and contemporary affirmation of a core tenet of democratic theory--that an informed and vocal citizenry is in fact more powerful than an illegitimate elite wielding the apparatus of government. The Velvet Revolution in Georgia and its Orange counterpart in Ukraine were thought of as the beginning of a chain reaction. Inspired by these successes, citizens of other countries with long histories of authoritarian or one-party rule could, through popular activism, purge themselves of totalitarian traditions and thus begin a new chapter of transparent, free, and accountable government.

Two and a half years later, the rest of the world is left looking upon a revolution that may have been more aptly dubbed rosy than orange. With the protesters and tent city gone from Kyiv's Independence Square, politics appear to have come full circle. After the 2006 round of parliamentary elections and several months of gridlock, the prime minister of the current government is none other than Viktor Yanukovych--the same Russian-leaning candidate whose fraudulent electoral victory sparked the Orange Revolution. President Yushchenko's party, Our Ukraine, garnered a mere 14 percent of the popular vote. The president approved the nomination of Viktor Yanukovych, whose Party of Regions won 32 percent of the ballots cast, to the position of Prime Minister on the condition that Yanukovych sign a non-binding agreement to continue to promote Ukrainian integration into the European Union and NATO and to respect the president's primacy in foreign policy. Prime Minister Yanukovych made little effort to respect this document, announcing soon after his appointment that Ukraine would be indefinitely delaying its application for NATO membership. More importantly, Yanukovych and his Party of Regions have been systematically stripping the presidency of all its meaningful powers. Most recently, Parliament passed (over a presidential veto) a law removing the authority to appoint the foreign and interior ministers from the president and assigning it to Parliament itself. Though the constitutionality of this bill awaits a ruling from the Supreme Court, its very passage shows that Yushchenko now finds himself in an office with little real political power.

What, if anything, is troubling about this situation? After all, the March 2006 parliamentary elections were arguably the most fair and transparent in Ukraine's history. Laws and changes to the law are made by parliamentary majorities. Ukraine has deviated from its earlier pro-Western course, but democracy ought to be judged by procedural fairness rather than the friendliness of winning parties to the West or any other region of the world. Regardless of these issues, the chief danger to democracy in post-Soviet states appears to be a powerful, authoritarian executive, by the likes of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus or Vladimir Putin in Russia. A parliamentary system, however, promises a more vibrant and democratic political system. Nonetheless, Yushchenko has shown himself to be a largely ineffective president who could not capitalize on the mandate offered to him by the Orange Revolution. His declining popularity and consequent loss of power are just reflections of these facts.

Continuing Problems

These arguments, while not without merit, mask a deep and troubling truth: Ukraine's political culture, and the political culture of many post-Soviet states, remains defective. Parties view their opponents largely as competitors for the political and economic spoils of power. The political system is geared not toward governance, but toward neutralization of potential challengers through legal or extralegal means. Dissent within party ranks is suppressed. Political allegiances are bought, sold, or extorted. The executive and legislative branches of government do not accord each other even minimal standards of respect and civility. Compromise, consensus, and cooperation are universally invoked, yet rarely demonstrated.

A cynic might observe that the above describes the electoral politics of any country in the world, including the United States. Perhaps democratic government is doomed to be adversarial and corrupt. Attributing these characteristics to a single country or region is both naive and stereotypical. But such a cynic dwells in a black-and-white world and cannot distinguish the shades in between. While all democracies contain significant tensions, the problems with political culture in Ukraine are particularly deep and acute. The backdrop to the Orange Revolution provides a striking example. In the fall of 2004, then-opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko nearly died as a result of dioxin poisoning--his face remains disfigured and he suffers health complications to this day. Though Yushchenko's subsequent survival and recovery galvanized the political opposition, the poisoning revealed that someone in power believed it would be better to kill Yushchenko than to risk campaigning against him. A legal investigation into the poisoning has yet to yield a conviction. The fraud--both its magnitude and its brazenness--in the series of presidential run-offs that followed would be farcical if not for the stakes. Voters were told to sign ballots with pens whose ink would disappear after several hours, certain districts reported turnout of over 100 percent, and journalists and accredited observers were intimidated and assaulted. The Orange Revolution is better understood as a collective reaction of disgust to these sorts of political practices than as a country coming together behind Yushchenko as a candidate. The hope was that the perpetrators of this fraud would be exposed, brought before the courts, and punished to make such behavior unlikely in the future.

Unfortunately, Yushchenko's presidency did not make this hope a reality. Ukraine's less-democratic elements, however, learned two important lessons. The first is to be more mindful of public perceptions both at home and abroad when pursuing power. The second is to ensure that the structure of the political and electoral processes are heavily weighted against potential opponents. The result is a political system in which parties and legislators mimic democratic procedures to effectively disguise decidedly undemocratic values.

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During the summer of 2006, Yushchenko agonized over whether to approve Yanukovych's appointment as prime minister or to dissolve parliament and call for new elections. He eventually approved the appointment, but several sources report that he did so only after a visit from two representatives from Yanukovych's Party of Regions who threatened, among other things, to expose corrupt business deals in which the president's brother was allegedly enmeshed.

Parliament has recently taken steps to further cement party allegiance. Yanukovych was able to broker his deal to strip the presidency of its few remaining powers only because he had the cooperation of Yushchenko's one-time ally, Yulia Tymoshenko--the leader of the most powerful opposition party, the eponymous Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko. In exchange for her votes, she received the support of the Party of Regions on a bill that forbids local ministers from changing their party affiliations--those who do can lose their seats and thus their livelihoods. Party discipline is useful in parliamentary politics, but this bill does more than pressure officials to toe the party line. Parties themselves, not courts, are in charge of enforcing this law. Myron Wasylyk explains that "in effect, those elected deputies who express independent views and do not follow the central party line face expulsion from party ranks and removal from public office."