On February 5, at 10:00 PM, 384 of the 377 regional council deputies elected by the BPP were former members of the Party of Regions. This constitutes almost a quarter (22%) of the presidential deputy corps in the regions. (Let's not forget that 17 of the 139 BPP deputies also came from the Party of Regions.) As it turns out, Yanukovych's party has proven to be a reliable personnel reserve for Poroshenko's party.
22% of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc members in regional councils and 12% in the Verkhovna Rada are former Party of Regions members.
BPP MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, the pro-presidential parliamentary faction's candidate for Health Minister, quickly scrubbed his biography, removing his membership in the Soyuz party and the Party of Regions. While this incident was certainly less significant and far-reaching than the scandal sparked by statements by Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius, the case of Honcharenko does reveal some of the cause-and-effect relationships involved in the "serious political crisis Ukraine is entering."
After all, you only have to strain your memory...
"Today, I assure you that the Party of Regions has been completely discredited by the behavior of its former leader—a murderer, a thief, a criminal. And I am certain that the Party of Regions has no chance of being revived..." This is how presidential candidate Petro Poroshenko assessed the prospects of the organization he co-founded at a rally in Mukachevo in May 2014.
On November 15, 2015, after the local elections, responding to a television channel's question regarding the fate of the Party of Regions and the Communists, the head of state stated the following: "When I was asked during the campaign whether I would issue a presidential decree banning the Communist Party of Ukraine, I said no. The Communist Party must lose the elections, then receive a court ruling for its crimes, and only then will we enact this into law. The same situation applies to those who are currently part of the Opposition Bloc, who are trying to be represented in local government or the Verkhovna Rada through elections."
Such a position hardly implied the president himself creating front parties for former Party of Regions members during local elections, much less providing them with large-scale spots on the Petro Poroshenko Bloc list.
However, by that very moment, a list-by-name analysis of party lists in 11 regions had already been published, featuring over 300 former members of the Party of Regions. "The majority of those who did not join the Opposition Bloc are running as candidates for the Petro Poroshenko Bloc Solidarity, Renaissance, and Our Region," Andriy Levus, a member of parliament from the People's Front, a "friendly" party to the BPP, wrote on his Facebook page on the eve of the elections. His statement cited "120 former members of Regions identified on the BPP lists, and 102 former members of the Party of Regions on the list of Our Region (a conformist project created by the Presidential Administration for the elections and comprising a diverse group of former members)." Also, according to Levus, 57 former members of the Party of Regions were found in the depths of the Renaissance, 28 in the Batkivshchyna party, and one each on the lists of the UKROP and Svoboda parties.
In response to the publication of this information and the practically direct accusations of a coalition partner "collaborating with representatives of the Yanukovych regime," the head of the BPP faction in parliament, Yuriy Lutsenko, made the following statement: "People who actively participated after the revolution, those who were ordinary members, or rather, statistical members of the Party of Regions, may be among us. I don't rule it out."
Using post-election statistics, we will try to assess the scale of the phenomenon and the degree of integration of Yanukovych's "statistical" supporters into the pro-presidential political force.
Let's look at the maps. Let's clarify right away: we're relying on information for 20 oblasts, as (for obvious reasons) data for Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts is unavailable, and in three other oblasts—Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Volyn oblasts—no former Party of Regions members were found on the BPP lists.
Thus, 84 of the 377 regional council deputies elected by the BPP are former members of the Party of Regions. This constitutes almost a quarter (22%) of the presidential deputy corps in the regions. (Let's not forget that 17 of the 139 BPP members of parliament also hail from the Party of Regions.) As it turns out, Yanukovych's party has proven to be a reliable personnel reserve for Poroshenko's party.
If we try to identify the areas of closest cooperation between the new government and representatives of the old one, the top five are headed by the Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa regions, where half of the BPP deputies in the regional councils are former members of the Party of Regions: 7 out of 14 and 11 out of 22 deputies, respectively.
In light of these statistics, one might wonder who suited Bankova more as Dnipropetrovsk's mayor: Kolomoisky's protégé Filatov or former Party of Regions member Vilkul? The same is true in Odesa, where the central government didn't particularly facilitate the mayoral campaign of Sasha Borovik, a member of Saakashvili's formally pro-presidential team, and, to put it mildly, didn't significantly hinder the incumbent mayor's victory. Gennady Trukhanov, a former MP from the Party of Regions and ex-head of the Party of Regions faction in the Odessa City Council.
A significant presence of former Party of Regions members is also observed in the Cherkasy Regional Council (38%, 7 deputies out of 18), Kharkiv (30%, 6 out of 20), Khmelnytskyi (29%, 5 out of 17), and Chernihiv (25%, 3 out of 12). As we can see, former Party of Regions members used the ruling party as a "roof" to return to power, not only in the East.
Among the outsiders in the "race of the former" is Kyiv, where two members of the Party of Regions (PPP) out of 52 deputies won seats in the Kyiv City Council on the BPP list. The Zakarpattia region also lost just one former member of the former government to the BPP's overall 15-member electoral roll.
And one more figure. As of the end of January of this year, 260 deputies from the BPP had been elected to city, district, and regional councils. Of these, 55 (21%) were former members of the Party of Regions, running under the banner of the presidential bloc. This means that today, every fifth local leader from the BPP is a former member of the Party of Regions. It's hard not to quote Pyotr Alekseyevich again: "New faces, new people—that's what characterizes our country now..."
Given the upcoming by-elections for the leadership of the still-headless local councils, this figure may be adjusted downwards or upwards.
Involving (or INTENDING) "former" individuals in politics and public administration is not, in itself, sedition. This is especially true if the people involved are professionals untainted by criminal involvement.
But in this case, there are questions. Both about the number of party "converts." And about their "statistical nature." And about their professional suitability.
It’s not worth a damn who so easily promised to “live in a new way…”
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