Parties In Ukraine Research Articles

Праворадикальная Партийная Политика в Постсоветской Украине и Загадка Электоральной Маргинальности Украинских Ультранационалистов в 1994–2009 гг

SUMMARY: The article by Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovtsov addresses one of the most surprising features of the post-Soviet political landscape: the unprecedentedly low profile of right-wing political parties in Ukraine throughout the two decades of its existence since acquiring independence. Despite the fact that ultranationalist parties emerged in Ukraine already during the last years of the Soviet Union and developed further in the 1990s, none of them was capable of sending any significant number of deputies to the parliament, not to mention forming a parliamentary faction. The authors discuss this exceptional phenomenon, and offer a number of possible explanations.

Unfriendly takeover: Successor parties in Ukraine

Research on successor parties in the former Soviet Union has mostly focused on leftist parties and paid little attention to their interplay with centrist forces which equally have their roots in the Soviet system. This article examines the development of both leftist and centrist successor parties in post-Soviet Ukraine. After consideration of the role of legacies of the old regime as well as the current legal and societal framework, the evolution of leftist parties and the so-called parties of power is explored. The analysis shows that the leftists were weakened by internal splits and a partial inability to modernize. But equally important was the logic of power preservation in the Leonid Kuchma regime, which promoted the formalization of the party of power and crowded out the leftist competitors.

Political parties in Ukraine

LIKE MOST POST-COMMUNIST STATES, Ukraine appears to have an anarchic and ineffective party system. A large number of small, ill organised and fractious political parties seemingly promote instability rather than stability, and hinder rather than help the tasks of building a stable civil society and market economy. In the interregnum between the collapse of the old regime and the formation of a new stable political order, the fear must be that if such parties cannot exercise much influence on the development of society, they are helping to create a political vacuum that may well be filled by some kind of revived authoritarianism. This article seeks first to examine the evidence for this proposition, second, to explain the main reasons for the weakness of Ukrainian parties, third, to analyse the trends towards greater structuralisation of the party system, and finally to outline the methods by which the Ukrainian authorities are hoping to strengthen the role of political parties in the future.