In the early morning hours after the recent parliamentary election in
Ukraine, I struggled to stay awake in a cramped, over-heated old
Soviet Cultural Center in a small village south-east of
Kiev.
As an election observer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), my team and I had observed voting and ballot counting for almost 24 hours throughout the region.
Bleary-eyed, I paced along the table where hundreds of long, brown paper ballots were stacked on tables in front of me meticulously counted by the exhausted members of the local election commission.
As I watched the process two words came to mind: tedious and transparent.
Elections are a long and tedious operation; like sausage making, not a pretty process to witness. Ukraine has been building its election muscles over the past few years with the most well publicized held in the winter of 2004—the “Orange” revolution. The image of tens of thousands of citizens camping in the snow for weeks became an international symbol for the new spirit of democracy in the former Soviet states.
From my team’s perspective, the election process was transparent and conducted in an open manner. We observed no major violations in the areas we visited, a reality reflected in the OSCE preliminary report. In 98 per cent of polling stations visited “observers assessed the voting process as good or very good.” The transparency of the recent election demonstrates Ukraine’s hard worked at creating a western style democratic electoral process.
A week after the Ukrainian elections, I stood in the cold, rainy streets of Moscow and watched a few hundred protesters gather to remember the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya and listen to angry speeches denouncing President Putin. Thousands of Special Forces and police surrounded the beleaguered protesters and the streets were blocked by Armored Personnel Carriers and other military vehicles in a clear message of intimidation from the Kremlin. President Putin’s recent decision to head a political party for the upcoming Parliamentary elections as well as his not so subtle hints at taking the position of Prime Minister next year have all been warmly received in the local Russian press.
In long, intense conversations with my Russian friends and colleagues, they regularly complain about the waste of time of elections and the cumbersomeness of the democratic process. They point at the deadlocked U.S. Congress and the often paralyzing effect of partisan politics. They deride the inability of Ukraine to maintain a stable ruling coalition over the past few years and point to the street protests in the Kyrgyz Republic as indicative of the disaster that can happen when people are allowed to express their own opinion. They see the competition of ideas and the difficulty of parties reaching compromise as a failure, rather than a natural outgrowth of the give and take of political parties and competing ideas. From one perspective, they are right; semi-authoritarianism is much easier and in the short-run is more efficient then a large unwieldy democracy.
This authoritarian approach symbolizes the Russian attitude towards democracy; they aren't against elections per se, but they want order, control and efficiency. They are interested in neither a tedious nor a transparent process. The danger is that the voice of the people will be lost in the search for great efficiency and control.
Yet in Ukraine, a country that has decided that it’s willing to go through the time consuming slog of establishing a rule of law, an electoral procedure and protecting the rights of the individual, the hard work has only just started. The West has provided its support, the citizens have fulfilled their role in peacefully voting, and it is now up to the political leaders to prove that they can manage a government that acts in the interest of the people— one of the most basic tenets of democracy.
