See how they run

The dispute between Premier Yulia Tymoshenko and the leader of the strongest parliamentary faction Viktor Yanukovych over a state residence can easily be considered the start of a new political season and the start of the presidential campaign. Though all of Ukraine’s political parties are waiting for the Constitutional Court to rule on the official date of the presidential ballot, the campaign headquarters of the main candidates in the race are raring to go. Weekly.ua looked into the make-up of the candidates and the main ideological strategies they will use in the next presidential race

Ukraine has proven more than once the degree to which the success of an election campaign depends on the level of professionalism and political spin techniques applied in election campaigns.

It suffices to recall the presidential elections in 1999 and 2004. In both cases, victory was gained by applying either manipulative tactics (as in Kuchma’s second term) or direct spins that were multiplied by team, administrative, financial and human resources.

Nobody knows better than Viktor Yanukovych, today’s most highly rated political figure in Ukraine, how important it is to have an experienced and clever campaign manager. In 2004 he hired to run his campaign headquarters Serhiy Tyhypko, who today is his rival.

Certain political analysts attributed the failure of the Yanukovych campaign to the Tyhypko’s inability to run such a campaign in difficult conditions. In fact, not much depended on Tyhypko. Totally different people managed the campaign of the “blue & white”, some of whom are still running the current election campaign of Yanukovych.

Ex-minister of finance Mykola Azarov is today the campaign manager of Yanukovych’s team. He is definitely a bright individual with many years of management experience on his resume, but in a totally different field. Clearly, Azarov in 2009 is not the same as Tyhypko in 2004, though certain parallels can be drawn.

This year one of Yanukovych’s confidantes Serhiy Levochkin will organize the election campaign tour. Levochkin is a representative of the group headed by Dmytro Firtash, who is fighting for control over the Party of Regions with Rinat Akhmetov and some other smaller groups.

Borys Kolesnikov, the political protege of Akhmetov, is responsible for working with local campaign headquarters. Sources from inside the Party of Regions campaign headquarters told Weekly.ua that another individual close to Yanukovych by the name of Anton Pryhotskiy is the party’s campaign manager. Rumor has it that he is not only a close business partner of the leader of the PoR, but also a close friend.

Other important figures on the Yanukovych electoral team are Andriy Klyuyev, one of the most influential politically and economically independent PoR members, and Vasyl Dzharty, who is running the election campaign in the southern region of the country.

Just as in previous campaigns, the PoR suffers from the absence of a single leader. Three streams can be observed in the party, which are connected to different sources of financing. They are the Akhmetov group, the Firtash group and a number of other smaller groups directly connected to Yanukovych.

As a result, even the teams inside the headquarters trying to gain control over financial flows have difficulty reaching a consensus. Naturally, this lowers the effectiveness of the team’s work overall.

The current situation can be attributed to the inability of Yanukovych to develop a concrete campaign management system. Albeit, there is a possibility that Yanukovych is organizing his team’s strategy in such a way that no groups will have a controlling package. Only time will tell how successful this tactic will be.

Viktor Nebozhenko, Director of the Ukrainskiy Barometr Sociological Service, says today the campaign headquarters are by and large built on party networks. “This is not good as the party’s regional networks are quite voracious but inefficient organizations. Such a trend was formed in 2004 and can be observed to this day. Everything boils down to allocation of money in the provinces and cities,” says Nebozhenko.

Unlike Yanukovych’s team, Tymoshenko’s people has yet to be officially designated. Oleksandr Turchynov will most get the campaign manager job, though it is still unclear how it will be legitimately registered as Turchynov is first deputy premier in the Tymoshenko government. In other words, Turchynov will have to step down from his post in order to officially head the campaign. Otherwise, problems with the legitimacy of the Cabinet may arise, something Tymoshenko’s rivals surely use against her.

Another potential candidate to run Tymoshenko’s election campaign is Andriy Portnov, though at the moment he is not on the premier’s good side meaning his chances are slim to none. In any case, Tymoshenko remains the leader of the pack that long ago built a strict top-down system of administration of her staff. Therein lies the clear merit in the appropriation of budget funds and the upcoming presidential election, which promises to be a harsh battle of ideology and political tricks.

There is a possibility that Turchynov’s right-hand man Andriy Kozhemyakin will be appointed a member of the organizational structure of the headquarters. The regional sector will most likely be headed by Yaroslav Fedorchuk, who is responsible for the propaganda of the Batkivschyna party.

President Viktor Yushchenko faces a more complicated situation. After the president replaced the adventurous and decisive Serhiy Baloha as the chief-of-staff with the loyal and cautious Vera Ulyanchenko, it is difficult to predict who will be named the formal leader of his campaign.

Well-informed sources say the informal leader of the president’s campaign is Ihor Tarasyuk, the chief of the ill-reputed State Affairs Administration. He is not about to give up his current position so that he can head Yushchenko’s election campaign team. In an attempt to clarify the actual state of affairs inside the headquarters of President Viktor Yushchenko, a correspondent of Weekly.ua learned about surreptitious forwarding of calls back and forth between the Presidential Secretariat and the Our Ukraine party.

More specifically, the press service of the Presidential Secretariat says Andriy Chirva, who possesses information about Yushchenko’s campaign headquarters, refused to answer our questions saying that the election campaign has not officially gotten underway and advised us to appeal to the press service of the Presidential Administration.

Kateryna Kosareva, Press Secretary of Our Ukraine, said the election team has yet to be formed and advised us to inquire at the Presidential Administration.

Be that as it may, Ulyanchenko will be responsible for putting Yushchenko in office for a second term, while the structure of the election campaign will be built on the pillars of provincial and county administrations. Nonetheless, most experts surveyed say it is senseless to overestimate the significance of administrative resources in this year’s election campaign. Many governors and heads of county administrations will most likely support either all candidates at the same time or the favorite, Yushchenko not being in this category.  The situation in the Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s headquarters is intriguing. In response to an inquiry of Weekly.ua the headquarters of the main pro-European candidate provided a set of citations from the Law on the Presidential Elections.

It appears that members of Yatsenyuk’s team do not have no idea of how to run an open campaign according to western standards, which theoretically could have become the gimmick of Yatsenyuk’s campaign. Nevertheless, Weekly.ua sources among the staff of the former Rada speaker affirm that Andriy Ivanchuk and Andriy Pushniy are running the campaign. They together with Yatsenyuk are graduates of the Law School of the Chernivtsi State University. They have known each other for years and run a business together.

Yatsenyuk’s obvious weakness compared to the old-timers in national politics mentioned above is understaffing in the regions. This is why people with a dubious reputation or with no experience running an election campaign or having no clue about its structure, methods and political strategy.

“Yatsenyuk is perceived by many as a bandwagon that in the future can bring in those groups of the regional elite that were never able to get a foot in the door as a member of any of the parties represented today in the parliament,” says political analyst Anatoliy Velymovskiy.

Although Yatsenyuk seems to understand this problem, it does not look as though he will manage to arrange work in the regions. Besides that, Yatsenyuk’s habit of taking all problems on his own shoulders that a candidate running for president should not even worry about is not likely to give initiative to his regional branches of the Front of Changes bloc.

One shouldn’t change horses in midstream

This is precisely the axiom that today’s frontrunners for the presidential seat Yanukovych and Tymoshenko have followed and decided to work only with trusted people.

According to information from the headquarters of Yanukovych, a group of American experts headed by Paul Manafort have been hired to run the candidate’s presidential campaign. So, we are sure to see Yanukovych as an open and friendly politician of the European type. His public campaign will be built on a constructive and positive image.

To what degree such an image fits the needs of most Ukrainians, not to mention to what degree it corresponds to the spirit of Yanukovych, is what is most important. As a rule, European politicians have never confused Macedonia with Kosovo. Only former U.S. President George Bush could get away with this, though as is common knowledge his campaign was not built on promises of happiness tomorrow.

Unlike Yanukovych’s spin doctors, Tymoshenko’s hired hands have built up and will continue to build a campaign based on alternatives. As in previous years, Tymoshenko’s campaign will be led by Oleksandr Abdulin (public relations) and Viktor Ukolov (advertising). Such renowned spin doctors as Oleh Medvedev and Ihor Hrynyov with extensive experience are consulting Tymoshenko, though she the final decisions on ideological and organizational issues - after consulting with the aforementioned gurus- is intirely up to her. The team of the famous Russian spin doctor Vladimir Granovsky is working on the campaign of Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Most Ukrainians have already seen his “masterpieces” on billboards and in bizarre leaflets that canvassers are handing out from olive drab tents strewn across sidewalks in Kyiv. Being the first politician to hit the campaign road, Yatsenyuk has managed to gain major brownie scores from his voters. At the same time, the obscure message his campaign managers are sending out to the average citizen has narrowed the circle of Yatsenyuk’s potential supporters.

The political tactics that Yatsenyuk’s team is using are creating serious ideological problems for the candidate, says Andriy Yermolayev, Director of the Sophia Sociological Research Center. Moreover, it will not be easy to resolve these problems after a false start.

“Employees responsible for media planning such as Maksym Kukhar and Oksana Makarenko remain the most active and independent in the campaign headquarters. The rest of the team is repeating the mistakes made in the previous campaign. It is equally ineffective and a huge waste of money,” says Nebozhenko.

The current presidential election campaign differs from the previous ones in that the classic confrontation that was their main distinctive feature has been considerably toned down, if not done away with altogether.

In 2004 the border between voters supporting the main candidates was quite clearly demarcated: Yanukovych (Southern and Eastern oblasts) and Yushchenko (Northern, Western and Central oblasts). In 2010 everything is not that clear-cut as the social distribution of voters’ sympathies is more important than the geographic distribution.

“Yanukovych’s electorate is mainly concentrated in large cities and provincial centers. The economically active strata of the population, meaning civil servants and business people, will be the first to vote for him. Tymoshenko is mostly supported by small communities and rural settlements. There are also low-income groups, people on welfare and retirees among her voters,” said Yermolayev.

Tymoshenko’s populist rhetoric helped her win over the sympathies of the voters that earlier supported left-wing and left-central-wing parties, such as the Socialist Party of Ukraine. Yatsenyuk’s main supporters are small and medium entrepreneurs with business in provincial cities and towns. All President Viktor Yushchenko can rely on in the upcoming elections is the votes of urban intellectuals and certain moderate nationalist patriots.

“The presidential election campaign in 2010 will be fundamentally different from all previous campaigns when the results of the first round of elections are almost always known in advance. This time around we will see a tooth-and-nail battle to get into the second round. The main battles that define the rivals in the second round will take place in the western, central and northern oblasts. It is precisely in those regions that Tymoshenko have to face competition from Yatsenyuk and Yushchenko.

Yanukovych has practically paved his way to the final round, though Tymoshenko and Yatsenyuk seem to have equal chances leading up to the start of the campaign,” said Velymovskiy.

In addition, the expert gave a low assessment of Yatsenyuk’s chances, mainly due to the fact that he does not have a bona fide team backing him and some blatant errors made in the organization of his campaign. It is very hard to speak of any chances for the current president Viktor Yushchenko.

The second round, no matter who goes up against Yanukovych, will be tough. It could turn that the positive techniques that Yanukovych’s team will try to apply may give negative results as in the second round of elections voters tend to vote against rather than for.

Tymoshenko’s team understands this perfectly well. From the very beginning the campaign has worked in this direction against rivals. The intellectual nature of Tymoshenko and her team are their strong point. The weak point is the reality of life, i.e. the economic recession that will determine the next president of Ukraine better than any election technique applied or team.

Director of the Sophia Sociological Research Center

Yanukovych will still garner the most votes in the eastern and southern oblasts of Ukraine. He will also get much more support from northern and central oblasts than in previous years. In western oblasts his rating is on the rise, which was proven by the recent elections to the Ternopil Oblast Council. Ideologically, Yanukovych’s campaign entails conservative economic reform combined with sound conservatism in foreign policy.

The western, central and some of the northern oblasts are Tymoshenko’s main electoral target. Simultaneously, the number of Tymoshenko’s supporters is on the rise in the country’s eastern and southern oblasts. Such trends are being observed mainly due to the growing populist moods among the voters and people in the marginal strata of society that are attracted by Tymoshenko’s radical rhetoric. The ideological basis of Yatsenyuk’s campaign is pretty foggy at the moment.