“I have bad news for the hucksters in power: people from all over Ukraine have gathered here to demand change!” Georgia’s ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili shouted passionately from the stage on October 17 in Kyiv. Cheered sporadically by a crowd of protesters under a canopy of party flags, including those of his own Movement of New Forces, he urged those present to demand that President Poroshenko consider resigning if their conditions were not met by the end of the day.
Other organizers of the rally were less ambitious, focusing on the original demands they had advertised as the “Great Political Reform.” That agenda had been declared about two months prior by the coalition of current MPs known as Euro-optimists (former journalists and activists who joined mainstream parties after the Maidan and entered Parliament in the 2014 general election), along with NGO activists. As the scheduled date of the protest drew closer, others, including Saakashvili’s nascent political movement, jumped on the bandwagon.
The first demand was for an independent anti-corruption court. If passed, this could help bring to justice the top officials facing corruption charges from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, whose cases now often stall in unreformed courts. Another demand was to restrict immunity for MPs. The third and final demand was to switch to a proportional, open-list electoral system. The current mixed system is highly controversial, enabling corruption over the distribution of party seats and preventing new faces from entering politics.
After two tense days marked by occasional clashes with police, the protesters had something to show for their activism—but it was far from a complete victory. On October 19, the Parliament voted for parts of a badly needed health care reform and launched the procedure to pass the bill restricting MPs’ immunity. The bill’s future is uncertain, as it still has to go through the Constitutional Court, then back to Parliament for two rounds of voting. Nothing was accomplished on the anti-corruption court, though President Poroshenko pledged to sponsor his own bill on the subject by year’s end. Meanwhile, the Parliament announced it would consider a change to the electoral law. But that crucial reform remains highly unpopular among most of the current parties and is not likely to be implemented. Protest organizers have pledged to keep pushing for it regardless.
What remained of the protest a week after it started was a handful of tents in front of the Parliament, with occasional small rallies engineered by Saakashvili’s Movement of New Forces. Most of the original demonstrators had withdrawn from the street, stressing that the protest had to remain peaceful. Some were concerned that the demonstrations could erupt in violence, as a result of outside provocation or otherwise. And the organizers seemed to diverge in their views of what to do next. “We do not abandon our demands and will continue to pursue them,” Mustafa Nayyem, one of the Euro-optimists, wrote on his Facebook page on October 19. “The Movement of New Forces stays with the people at the tent town and continues the protest. The other participants will continue to seek the results through their own efforts and means.”
Some commentators have argued that the protest was an effective case of street pressure: the organizers could not claim full success, but they at least pushed politicians to act. More have been skeptical about the readiness of average people—and even some of the organizers—to rally for the demands mentioned above. The political journalist Milan Lelich spoke for many in seeing discord behind the facade of the protesters’ unity. “It was clear from the beginning that the patchy coalition of organizers and participants is after different goals: some pursue the previously announced objectives, some are rocking the boat, some see themselves replacing Poroshenko, and some simply want to hit a policeman,” Lelich wrote. “Sooner or later these differences would manifest themselves. That’s what happened by Wednesday night [the second day of the protest].”
What virtually all observers agreed, though, is that the three original demands themselves were valid and should be respected by the President and Parliament.
October’s protests may not have delivered the sweeping and immediate change that their organizers hoped. But they were nonetheless notable as an indicator of how the post-Maidan generation may seek to influence the political process going forward. In 2013-2014, the young were the ones who sparked the revolution. In October, they were mostly at the helm of the protest.
Ukraine’s young generation is now more actively engaged in the country’s civic life than ever before, working across a wide range of fields. They can be found toiling in Parliament and the defense sector, in economic ministries and R&D labs, or doing civil society work in the realms of culture, art, public diplomacy, and education. If their influence is to last and lead to lasting changes, though, this generation must bring a new quality of leadership into Ukrainian politics and civil society. A few challenges loom on the way.
The greatest one is the lack of upward mobility for young people, the absence of what are commonly referred to as “social lifts” in Ukraine. These are the mechanisms that inject new blood into the policymaking system. Right after the Maidan, the lifts were relatively open, as mainstream political parties saw new faces on their party lists as an asset. This helped investigative journalists, activists, business professionals and politicians with relatively untainted reputations get into parliament, ministries, and top government agencies.
Soon enough, the mainstream parties proved unable and unwilling to deliver a new quality of politics. They began to slide back into the old modus operandi of balancing between the interests of various oligarchic groups in order to stay in power and keep the war-torn country afloat. Such a balancing act may be a necessary evil in a case like Ukraine’s, where a distorted system of governance exists everywhere from the national to the local levels, and takes time to change—especially in a time of war. Ultimately, though, Ukraine has to remain open to a new kind of leadership, even if it comes only gradually. Otherwise, it will freeze in place, unable to evolve or address the mounting frustrations of voters.
Slowly but surely, dissenting reformers have been squeezed out of the system. Some have left the parties they ran with due to disagreement with their approaches, while others have stayed and criticized their party leaders, thus minimizing their chances to run on their party lists in the next election in 2019. Some, however, have seized the opportunity to shape their own movement. Ukraine has several parties that have emerged or gained visibility in the three years since the Maidan. These include Democratic Alliance, initially a youth organization that now promotes itself as a center-right reform-oriented party; Syla Liudey, or the Power of the People, which is now trying actively to build its grassroots network across Ukraine; and Samopomich, an initially regional party established in 2012 by Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, which landed third in the 2014 election with almost 11 percent of the vote.
Many smaller initiatives and individual activists have also popped up to advance various agendas, from the fight against corruption in the law enforcement system and the military, to garnering support for political prisoners in Crimea, to pressuring local authorities into making municipal facilities accessible to disabled people. However, these forces have not yet managed to consolidate under one banner with a credible political platform.
Likeminded activists often respond as a united front to initiatives that could threaten the progress of reforms accomplished so far. They try to build up their presence outside of Facebook and large urban hotspots of political activism, albeit often without effective coordination. To a certain extent, they stand for the principles that Ukrainians seek in their political elite, including respect for the rule of law, transparency and accountability. But they will not be able to compete with the consolidated old system unless they consolidate too.
This is not easy to do. Many of the new leaders seem to have serious personal political ambitions that stand in the way of potential consolidation. Democratic Alliance offers a good example. Led initially by the charismatic economist and long-time activist Vasyl Gatsko, the movement gained visibility during the Maidan. It then received a boost after the July 2016 party conference, when it was joined by several well-recognized new politicians, such as the former investigative journalists Serhiy Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem. These days, Leshchenko is becoming more visible to the average voter as an independent politician criticizing those in power—most often for good reasons—and publicizing cases of raider attacks against small and mid-sized businesses. Meanwhile, Nayyem is seen touring Ukraine’s regions with the Initiative of Real Actions, a new group of reform-minded activists trying to build support and recognition at the grassroots level. A plurality of political affiliations is not a bad thing in itself, and some disagreements are to be expected during the evolution of new political forces. In Ukraine’s political environment, however, this phenomenon threatens to marginalize the new political forces.
Some of the actors that present themselves as part of the new political movement prefer tried-and-true populist tactics. Saakashvili’s conduct at the latest protest or during his earlier crossing of the Polish-Ukrainian border are illustrative of this. “I promise to those in power that they will have a lot of problems, wasted nerves, money and time. And I promise to all of us a peaceful, calm, organized, legitimate victory. We will make it happen together,” he said at a rally on October 19, referring to the eventual replacement of those currently in power. “Let’s have a referendum on a vote of no-confidence in them,” someone from the crowd shouted. Whether Saakashvili has in mind a snap election or another Maidan is unclear. Whether he has in mind the consequences of any of those moves when the country is at war and wracked by painful economic changes is equally unclear.
Saakashvili has at times been joined by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who appeared alongside him when he crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border in September. Tymoshenko has already announced her presidential ambitions, and her approval ratings are currently rising thanks to her personal charisma and populist rhetoric. Given her political history, though, some reformers see her as a liability. During her time in office, Tymoshenko failed to deliver necessary structural reforms, and couldn’t avoid coming into conflict within the post-Orange Revolution political camp, which helped pave Viktor Yanukovych’s path to power. Based on that experience, many in Ukraine find it hard to believe that she would do any better this time and see her growing popularity as a threat. Yet that did not prevent Saakashvili from accepting her support—whether genuine or aimed at a PR effect—in the border-crossing adventure.
Appearing with such characters may well help young forces attract more visibility and voters. But it will not bring about a new quality of politics, and it may even discredit the young forces by association. The dilemma is further complicated by the fact that the new movements have far fewer financial resources compared to the mainstream parties or populists.
The geopolitical environment presents yet another serious challenge to the young generation in Ukraine. The Transatlantic community is now predominantly focused on its own survival. It has little appetite for encouraging Ukraine’s integration aspirations, which remains a major priority among the youth. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, by contrast, has strategic patience and expects Ukraine eventually to return into Russia’s sphere of influence. Ukraine’s young generation needs to figure out how it will shape the country’s strategy in these circumstances, and how it will help Ukrainian society remain optimistic about its geopolitical future.
The run-up to the 2019 elections will be a time of serious fighting over the short- to mid-term future of the new generation in Ukraine’s politics. The path to political power for reformers is a murky one. If this fall’s events are any indication, we will likely witness more chaos in terms of alliances, hopefully some consolidation of reasonable forces, and more attacks against them in the years to come. One thing is certain, though: All the previous “young generations”—from the dissidents of the Soviet Union, to the students that drove the Revolution on the Granite in 1990, to the youth that took part in the 2004 Orange Revolution—have, in the end, pushed Ukraine a step forward.