Ukraine Crisis Fosters New Political Breed
By Volodymyr Verbyany Oct 23, 2014 5:22 AM ET
Andriy Teteruk had just returned from fighting as a volunteer battalion leader in eastern Ukraine when he received an invitation from Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to run for parliament on his People’s Front ballot.
“I also got proposals from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party,” Teteruk, 41, a former policeman who escaped encirclement during the August offensive of pro-Russian separatists, said in an interview in Kiev. “I realized that fortune gave me a chance and I must use it.”
Ukraine’s upheaval is creating opportunities for a new generation of politicians like Teteruk in the Oct. 26 general elections, even as voters remain skeptical about the extent to which the old political class will be swept away. War heroes, Maidan activists, leaders of non-government organizations and journalists renowned for fighting corruption are all running for election to the Verkhovna Rada.
Standoff in Ukraine
The yearlong crisis has wiped out or marginalized the monolithic parties that dominated the country’s electoral landscape in the past decade, when ballots were episodes of the struggle between the Party of Regions of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party.
Party of Regions collapsed after Yanukovych’s flight. Much of its former support base is in Crimea, annexed by Russia in March, and in eastern Ukraine, where voting will be hindered by a pro-Russian insurgency that has raged for months. Tymoshenko, a key figure in the Orange revolution that blocked Yanukovych’s rise to the presidency in 2004, is fighting to clear the 5 percent threshold.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-22/ukraine-crisis-fosters-new-political-breed.html