Ukraine

Political process

Citizens 18 years of age and older have the right to vote. Until 1990 the only legal political party in Ukraine was the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), which was a branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Major legislation approved by the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet originated in, or was approved by, the CPU. A change to the Ukrainian constitution in October 1990 allowed nascent political parties to be officially recognized. Subsequently, a wide array of parties emerged. Many parties, however, have lacked strong organizational bases and coherent platforms, and individual parties have tended to join together in parliament as blocs.

The centre-right, nationalistic Popular Movement of Ukraine, or Rukh, founded in 1989, was instrumental in the campaign for Ukrainian independence but afterward lost strength. The CPU—re-formed in 1993 after a 1991 ban on the Soviet-era CPU was lifted—retains support, mainly in the industrialized and Russophone reaches of eastern Ukraine and among older voters. Several other parties, such as the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, have had socialist, if not Marxist-Leninist, orientations. During the Kuchma presidency (1994–2005), a number of opposition parties coalesced. These parties supported the 2004 Orange Revolution, a series of mass protests that helped to bring Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency in 2005. The most important of these pro-Western “Orange” parties were Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine (known from 2007 as Our Ukraine–People’s Self-Defense) and the eponymous bloc of Yuliya Tymoshenko, leader of the Fatherland party. Viktor Yanukovych—who succeeded Yushchenko as president in 2010—headed the popular Party of Regions, which supported stronger ties to Russia. Among the parties that forced Yanukovych from power in 2014 were Fatherland, Vitali Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms (UDAR), and the ultranationalist Svoboda (“Freedom”) party.