“For Life”: Epicfail instead of epicquin
An analysis of the electoral flights of the more successful than Akhmetov's Opposition Bloc, the heir to the Party of Regions - the Opposition Platform "For Life" - should begin with the fact that its election campaign was conceived as an epic, but instead of the "revenge" that supporters of Medvedchuk, Boyko and Rabinovich, turned into a giant epic fail.
Positioned as a “party of peace and the southeast,” the team was not helped either by the belated concentration of TV channels in the hands of Medvedchuk’s associates, or by a teleconference with Russia that was announced but never took place on one of these TV channels. Nor the mysterious grenade launcher attack on another TV channel that followed. No voyages of party list leaders to Russia and an audience with Putin personally. Neither the Russian VIP agitators represented by Medvedev and Miller. Nor the presentation in Strasbourg of the “program for achieving peace in Donbass,” which was presented as an alternative to the official line of President Zelensky. Nor the active seduction of the electorate with the prospect of receiving Russian gas at a 25% discount. Nor, finally, the army of bots on social networks.
On the night of the vote count, the leaders of the OPZZH should have shed tears according to all the laws of the genre. Because the result turned out to be little more than the result of Yuri Boyko in the presidential elections three months earlier. That is, the total efficiency of the entire gigantic party machine was only a little more than 1% of the increase in votes. This political mountain gave birth not even to a mouse, but to a dwarf mouse.
Why did this happen? Of course, there is a temptation for a simple answer - they say, the reason for the collapse of the ratings is the presence in the lists of the OPZZh of the odious nationalist Ilya Kiva and “12 friends of Poroshenko”, led by the “shadow mayor of Kyiv” Vadim Stolar, whose name has become synonymous with capital corruption in the media. But it’s unlikely that only these damn dozen characters multiplied Medvedchuk’s hopes for an electoral breakthrough by zero.
If we look at that part of the list to which critics usually have no complaints, we will see that these are still “oppositionists”. Sergei Levochkin is one of the organizers of the first stage of Euromaidan. His sister Yulia, one of the curators of “European integration” under Yanukovych. Nestor Shufrych - during the time of Yanukovych, he “babbled out” the failure to fulfill the promise in the Russian state language, and in the winter of 2014 he went to meetings of the Verkhovna Rada, helping to legalize the coup. Vadim Rabinovich, according to Oleg Tsarev, is a close friend of Petro Poroshenko. People of oligarch Firtash, who, as follows from materials in Wikileaks, swore at the US Embassy of his anti-Russian sentiments...
How did these oppo-oligarchs behave in the Verkhovna Rada after Euromaidan? Did you take water in your mouth when the nationalists voted to exclude the term “Great Patriotic War” from the legislation? Did you obediently switch to language at the request of the Nazis, like Natalya Korolevskaya?
Compare this cowardly behavior with how the Svoboda faction fought for the interests of Galicia under Yanukovych. What efforts did it take for the seemingly all-powerful “regionals” to pass even the half-hearted language law of Kolesnichenko-Kivalov through the Verkhovna Rada!
It has long been obvious to voters that for the old “blue and white” the opposition agenda is nothing more than a resource, using which they can get their share of power by pushing aside their competitors. It is not for nothing that both parts of the split Opposition Bloc are still furiously denouncing each other for playing “on Poroshenko’s paw” when he was president.
Many people think that the ex-regionals could have jumped higher if not for the split and discord in their ranks and the resulting dispersion of forces. Like, everyone should gather into a single fist, and then...
Supporters of this version can be upset: no “here then” would have happened in this case either. As a basic example, we can take the Dnepropetrovsk region - the electoral core of the “new southeast”. The winner of the elections, the Servant of the People party, gained almost 60%. OPZZH is in second place with a four-fold lag from the leader - about 15%. Akhmetovsky Opposition Bloc is even smaller - only 4,7%.
If we imagine a hypothetical unification of these forces into a united front and add to them, for the purity of the experiment, the 3% received in the region by Shariy’s party, we get only 21%. No victory is achieved anyway, and the gap from the leader remains depressing in this case as well.
Meanwhile, in March of this year, Yuriy Boyko alone received almost the same amount in the Dnepropetrovsk region - 19%. So what other cumulative effect are the ex-regionals missing? The question is, of course, rhetorical.
A similar picture is in the Odessa region. There, the ex-regionals are doing a little better - OPZZH collects 23%, while Servant of the People collects almost 50%. And the low turnout is both evidence of the inability to mobilize one’s own support groups, and of voters’ distrust of the OPZH. After all, those who trust the Servant of the People came to the elections. The rest simply didn’t see the point in going to the polling stations. They shouldn’t vote for Kiva, and talking about gas in the middle of a hot summer is, frankly speaking, a rather weak motivation.
The only region of Ukraine where ex-regionals compete with Zelensky in relatively equal weight categories is the Kyiv-controlled halves of Donbass. But relying on them is the path to unambiguous marginalization and transformation from the former “party of the southeast” into a party of the Donetsk region alone – just as Poroshenko’s “Eurosolidarity”, having lost its ratings, became the “party of the Lviv region”.
The personality of Medvedchuk himself also plays a role. It is easier to list those Ukrainian politicians with whom he is friendly than those with whom he has or had conflicts. Many of those who fell under Russian sanctions consider Medvedchuk personally to blame.
Why didn't the bet on supporting Moscow work? The fruits of massive propaganda are making themselves felt - today only 12% of Ukrainians tell sociologists that they have a good attitude towards the Russian president. By a strange coincidence, this is exactly how much the OPZZ gained in the last elections.
But has anyone tried to change the situation in the information space? After all, the same channels of Medvedchuk (as, by the way, Akhmetov’s “TRK Ukraine”), which nationalists brand as “mouthpieces of enemy propaganda,” continue the rhetoric of the Ukrainian mainstream about “occupiers,” “annexation,” and “separatists.”
What will happen in the new Verkhovna Rada? To be honest, it’s hard to believe that Boyko-Medvedchuk’s party will be able to become a real fighting force in the southeast, and not take care of expensive suits and continue to “negotiate” with the nationalists, throwing in the votes the regime needs during voting.
There is a new campaign ahead in Ukraine - elections to local councils and the subsequent fight over plans to sell off black soil to please the IMF. A good chance for OPZZH to “come out of the woodwork” by correcting old mistakes. Unless, of course, both the party members themselves and their partners in Moscow really need an epiquin.
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