Spitting Image

The Wall Street Journal :: September 27, 2007 :: link to article on the WSJ site
by Adrian Karatnycky

Poland and Ukraine are partners in hosting the 2012 European Soccer Cup and Poland is Ukraine’s staunchest advocate in the European Union. But it turns out the two states have many more affinities. With parliamentary elections looming in Ukraine (September 30) and Poland (October 21), the political campaigns in these countries are remarkably alike. Both races are making it clear that such issues as corruption and morality have become the prism through which many voters are judging the dynamic post-communist world of rapid, market-driven growth.

In both Poland and Ukraine, the political elites (and publics, to a lesser degree) are deeply and bitterly divided by the legacies of the past. In Ukraine, the political morality play surrounds the rapid accumulation of wealth in recent years by a handful of super-rich, and, some allege, corrupt oligarchs. In Poland, there is political schism on how to handle the predations of the Communist past, particularly whether citizens and politicians who may have collaborated with the security services should be exposed.

Poland’s political divide occurs along sociological fault lines, with better educated, middle class voters preferring to move forward, and the lower middle classes and industrial workers more inclined to support politicians advocating a full accounting.

Ukraine’s fault lines have a more geographic cast, with voters in the West and Center inclined to back those seeking the settling of scores with oligarchs, while voters in the East support their rich native sons who made good by turning around formerly decrepit enterprises, even if these were ill-gotten.

Paradoxically, in both countries, the leading anti-establishment parties are headed by consummate political insiders: Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) is led by the combative, incumbent Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski (whose more moderate twin brother Lech is President). In Ukraine, the insurgent anti-establishment tone is set by BYuT, the eponymous bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, herself a former energy oligarch and ex-Prime Minister.

The right-of-center, populist, and “anti-oligarch” campaigns of Prime Minister Kaczynski and Ms. Tymoshenko may not win them power, but they are setting the terms of political debate. They also have contributed to the near-total disappearance of the traditional communist and socialist Left. Poland’s ex-Communists have vanishd as an independent force, replaced by the Left and Democrats (LiD), a social-liberal coalition that has shed politicians with odious links to the Communist era and is peopled with budget-balancing economists and anti-Communist activists from the Solidarity underground of the 1980s. In Ukraine, the hardline Communist party looks set to get no more than 5 percent, while the Socialist party, which betrayed its Orange coalition partners and backed the ruling Party of Regions last year, won’t even get the modest 3 percent needed to enter parliament.

As a result, Ukraine’s voters will chose among two Europe-oriented forces with roots in the Orange Revolution: the centrist, free-market Our Ukraine-National Self-Defense grouping of President Viktor Yushchenko and the more populist Tymoshenko bloc. Their major opponent is the ruling Party of Regions, whose billionaire business leaders say they favor a liberal agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and membership in the EU. Still, the Party of Regions has numerous politicians who support a state directed economy, are linked to voter fraud that sparked the Orange Revolution, and seek economic integration with Russia. And its leader, Prime Minister Yanukovych, his certainty of victory in question, appears to have lost his nerve and has adopted a shrill and bitter tone that castigates the “Orange plague.”

In Poland, the major forces vying for power are the conservative Law and Justice party; the social-liberal Left and Democrats bloc; and the Civic Platform, the major centrist, liberal party, led by the bland but reassuring Donald Tusk.

Why has all this happened? And why are Ukraine’s and Poland’s politics dominated by culture and values? First, both countries experienced major civic revolutions. In Poland, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was a civic and labor movement that marshaled high moral principles and achieved unity through nonviolent tactics that led to the defeat of Communism in 1989. In Ukraine, the triumphant Orange Revolution of 2004, headed by Viktor Yushchenko, was similarly an exemplary movement driven by high-minded principles and a commitment to rigorous nonviolent civic resistance.

It was perhaps inevitable that, once in power, personal political ambitions and political differences suppressed in the struggle against authoritarianism, would splinter these broad-based movements and impede their agendas. Still, the inability of both Solidarity and the Orange forces to meet excessively high public expectations for rapid change created a residue of deep bitterness that influences the political culture of both countries.

A second reason why politics in Ukraine and Poland is largely about values and culture-- not about policy prescriptions-- is the strong state of their economies. Both countries are in the midst of longstanding economic booms with rising living standards. Poland’s GDP grew over 6 percent in 2006, and has achieved an annual growth rate of over 7 percent in the first half of this. While in Ukraine, since 2000, the GDP has expanded by an average of more than 7 percent per year.

As a result, all major parties in both countries reject dramatic shifts in economic policy and, electoral promises notwithstanding, are likely to pursue centrist, business-friendly policies.

Politics and political campaigning in Poland and Ukraine today suggest a bitter twilight struggle and are filled with dramatic charges of “crisis,” “corruption,” ”immorality”, and “criminality.” But after the dust settles in both countries and the votes are counted, the influence of free media, civil society, a growing middle class, and a powerful business elite will constitute a moderating force on politicians. So, too, will the steadying influences of Ukraine’s centrist President Viktor Yushchenko and Poland’s moderate President Lech Kaczynski.

For the moment politics in Warsaw and Kyiv makes for fascinating theatre. But in reality, it is the storm before the calm.

Adrian Karatnycky is a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council of the U.S. and President of the Orange Circle, a non-governmental group working to build support for reform in Ukraine.