Viktor Yanukovych Apparent Ukraine Presidency Winner

Pro-Moscow challenger Viktor Yanukovych has apparently won the race for the presidency of Ukraine, defeating the pro-Western Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and taking the prize that eluded him six years ago.

Yanukovych's victory is interpreted by numerous observers as the death of the Orange Revolution that culminated in January 2005.

Following elections in 2004 which many Ukrainians rejected as fraud-riddled and rigged for a Yanukovych win, came a series of protests in the form of general strikes and civil disobedience that came to be called the Orange Revolution. The unrests led to more voting which led to the victory of a pro-Western government in which Tymoshenko was prime minister.

But many Ukranians became disenchanted with the pro-Western government in which Tymoshenko served especially because of economic reversals. As a result, it appears the pro-Russian Yanukovych will be Ukraine's next president.

As the Associated Press reports:

Central Election Commission data showed Yanukovych garnering 48.7 percent to Tymoshenko's 45.7 percent, with 1 percent of ballots remaining to be counted. More than 4 percent of voters cast ballots marked "against all," a signal of the widespread disaffection among voters.

 

Yanukovych has claimed victory and his team kicked off festivities by calling on the prime minister to admit defeat.

"She should remember her own democratic slogans and recognize the results of the elections," said Anna German, deputy chairwoman of Yanukovych's Party of Regions.

As NPR's David Greene recently explained on "Morning Edition" last week Yanukovych, aware that many Ukrainians don't want a return to the nation's strongman past, has tried to remake his image into a kinder, softer leader.

An excerpt from the web story that accompanied David's radio piece:

People like some of what he represents, especially in eastern Ukraine, where Russian is spoken far more than Ukrainian.

He told a crowd of thousands in the coal-mining city of Donetsk that if he becomes president, he will sign a law protecting a Ukrainian's right to speak and do business in Russian.

But while many Ukrainians say they're looking for a leader with his tough style, they don't want to return to their authoritarian past. That public sentiment explains why Yanukovych has tried to shed his old image as a stooge of Moscow.

In an interview this week, he stuck to that script and said that as president, he would look westward.

"Ukraine must integrate into the European Union. Ukraine has to introduce social standards and technical standards of Europe. And I will strive to sign a free-trade agreement with the EU," he said.

Yanukovych won the first round of presidential voting last month. And in this Sunday's runoff, he faces a familiar foe, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. During the Orange Revolution, she made Yanukovych a villain, calling Ukrainians into the streets to protest his apparent victory.

Five years on, Ukrainians are disappointed. They feel the experiment of the Orange Revolution hasn't made life better. The economy has worsened.

The conditions paved the way for the Orange Revolution's enemy to come back. Yanukovych is a former mechanic from eastern Ukraine, a tall, broad-shouldered tough guy who doesn't mince his words.

"In the last five years, Ukraine lost very much. These have been lost years in the development of Ukraine," he said.

Yanukovych isn't a squeaky-clean politician: He once served jail time on assault charges. His opponent in this election has played up his long-standing ties to Ukraine's rich and powerful, the so-called oligarchs.

None of this is lost on voters. Coal miner Roman Fyodorov says that Yanukovych isn't his ideal president.

"They're all bandits," he says. "Yanukovych is just our bandit."

David J. Kramer, a senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, takes issue with the idea that the Orange Revolution is over. He writes in Foreign Policy magazine that the very fact that the recent election was deemed to be clean by international observers indicates that the effects of the revolution are very much alive.

An excerpt:

But while less invigorating than the 2004 campaign, this year's vote was also quite a bit cleaner. Last time, the leading opposition candidate, Yushchenko, was poisoned with dioxin; those responsible have still not been held accountable. The media in 2004 operated in a climate of fear and were given orders from the administration on what to write and report. The party in power engaged in massive electoral abuse, for example by spending state resources to support the candidacy of the incumbent, Yanukovych. Russia weighed in — in an incredibly heavy-handed manner, providing some $600 million in support of Yanukovych's campaign. As if the message wasn't clear enough, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood at Yanukovych's side twice during the race to demonstrate his country's support for the incumbent, once during a military parade down a main street in Kiev. Of course, Moscow's support eventually backfired as Ukrainians decided that they (not the Russians) should choose their leader.

No such funny business was repeated this time around, nor during parliamentary elections in 2006 and 2007. None of the candidates faced harm or intimidation. The media are today the freest and most diverse in the former Soviet Union. Although some journalists are still on the payrolls of candidates and business interests (it doesn't help that oligarchs own most of the TV stations), they are free to slam the government and candidates at will — without fear for their lives. Administrative abuses have been minimal, evidenced by the fact that the sitting president came in an embarrassing fifth place. And even Russia largely stayed on the sidelines, having learned its lesson the hard way five years ago. Besides, this time Moscow seemed ambivalent between the two front-runners. As one observer put it, Moscow likes Tymoshenko but doesn't trust her; they trust Yanukovych more but don't like him.

All these positives add up to an election that is fundamentally different from the 2004 vote. This is in fact the third ballot, after the two parliamentary ones in 2006 and 2007, to have passed the test of international election observers. In other words, Ukraine has shown that it knows how to conduct good elections in a relatively democratic space. That neither candidate in this second round was terribly appealing should not detract from the gains that have been made over the past five years...

,,, But here's the message to those writing the obituaries of the Orange Revolution: Put down your pens and step back from those keyboard, get over your Ukraine fatigue, take aspirin for the headaches still to come, and do everything possible to ensure that the positives from 2004 do not go to waste.