Ukrainians’ deep cynicism may have played a decisive role Sunday in the apparent presidential election victory of Viktor Yanukovych, a charisma-starved ex-convict whose last bid for this country’s top political job ended in disaster when his campaign was caught engaged in massive fraud.
Exit polls in this so-called beauty-versus-the-beast contest indicated Sunday he had narrowly defeated Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the golden-haired populist heroine of the Orange Revolution that overturned Yanukovych’s rigged victory back in 2004.
Yanukovych, a former mechanical engineer whose support base is in the Russian-speaking East and South, got support ranging from 48.7 to 50.3 percent, according to six different exit polls.
Tymoshenko, often dubbed “Europe’s Evita,” got between 44 and 45.6 percent.
Ukrainians’ disillusionment over their corrupt and always-bickering political leaders helped defeat Tymoshenko, since between five and six per cent of voters chose the “against all” option on the ballot, noted European Council on Foreign Relations analyst Andrew Wilson.
“The abstainers decided the election; Tymoshenko could have closed the gap with their votes,” Wilson wrote in his blog.
Yanukovych’s apparent victory, if confirmed by official results Monday and if endorsed by foreign observers, puts the country’s fate in the hands of a man backed by shadowy billionaires from Eastern Ukraine.
“Yanukovych’s victory is a triumph for Ukraine’s powerful business clans,” said David Marples, who teaches at the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.
“Ukraine’s deeply ingrained corruption will likely remain, from top to bottom of society, led by a somewhat unsavoury figure with a checkered past.”
Yanukovych gave a victory speech Sunday that promised economic reforms for a country in economic crisis and reliant on an International Monetary Fund bailout.
But Tymoshenko, who has warned repeatedly that her opponent was engaged in 2004-style fraud, refused to concede defeat.
"It is too early to draw conclusions,” she said.
Ukraine, with a population of 46 million, is viewed as geographically critical due to its between Europe and Russia.
Moscow’s ability to control Ukraine directly or indirectly has always been seen as fundamental to Russia’s imperial ambitions.
Many in Canada’s 1.2 million Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora, who are mainly descended from Western Ukraine, mistrust Yanukovych because of his strong support for closer relations with Russia, a country deeply resented in Western Ukraine due to bitter historical experiences, particularly under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Roughly 17 per cent of Ukraine’s population is ethnic Russian, located mainly in the East and South, and many more from that region are Russian-speaking Ukrainians who don’t share the nationalist Ukrainian fervour in Western Ukraine.
Yanukovych, 59, was labelled a “Moscow Stooge” in 2004 thanks to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s overt support for his candidacy.
But he has undergone an image makeover under the tutelage of Paul Manafort, a high-priced American lobbyist and consultant to Republican presidents and presidential candidates from Gerald Ford, both Bushes, and John McCain.
While Manafort could do little with his candidate’s painfully slow speaking style, or his frequent gaffes, he has brilliantly kept Yanukovych out of situations such as the scheduled TV debate with the much smoother Tymoshenko last week.
The University of Alberta’s Marples said the prospects of membership in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization appear “firmly closed,” resulting in the new regime seeking “to continue profitable trade with Europe, while improving relations with Russia.”
He also said Yanukovych will likely ease Moscow’s obsessive concern about the security of its Black Sea fleet by indicating he’ll extend the lease, something Yushchenko vehemently opposed.
While Tymoshenko is also beholden to billionaire oligarchs who funded her more than $150-million US election campaign, Yanukovych is viewed by many as a puppet of eastern Ukraine’s powerful clans.
His biggest backer is shadowy multibillionaire Rinat Akhmetov, the country’s richest man and one of the wealthiest in the world.
Yanukovych, who grew up poor and was jailed twice in his youth for violent crimes, is a former mechanical engineer who became a source of ridicule several years ago by misspelling the word “professor” on his resume.
He entered regional politics in 1996 in Donetsk, a city in the heart of coal and steel industries, and after several promotions was pushed in 2002 by the region’s powerful clans to become then-president Leonid Kuchma’s prime minister in 2002.
“The Donetsk group were also Ukraine’s toughest tough guys, having honed their skills in the gangster wars of the 1990s, which were particularly vicious in Ukraine’s ”˜Wild East,’” Wilson wrote in his book The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation.
“The Donetsk group simply imposed Yanukovych on a weakened Kuchma.”
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