Parliamentary elections were held in Ukraine on 29 March 1998. The Communist Party of Ukraine remained the largest party in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine), winning 121 of the 445 seats, but no party gained a majority of seats, resulting in a hung parliament that eventually resulted in elements of the left supportive of president Leonid Kuchma being placed in leadership positions.
Poor perception of the economy and Kuchma's economic liberalisation programme was a key issue in the election, as was the perception that Kuchma and members of his government were closely connected with Ukrainian oligarchs and members of the Ukrainian mafia and that the Verkhovna Rada's deputies were largely corrupt. Ukraine's oligarch and mafia groups (including leading "clans" such as the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia, the Donetsk Clan and the Kyiv Seven) participated in the election through utilising political parties as front organisations. The 1998 election was the first Ukrainian parliamentary election to used a mixed-member proportional representation system, after the previous election's first-past-the-post system resulted in electoral chaos.
The election was generally considered to be free and fair, though significant discrepancies occurred in Crimea, where members of the Crimean Tatar population were prevented from voting and engaged in violent clashes with police, and in the city of Odesa, where a series of events of electoral violence occurred as part of the simultaneous mayoral election. As a result of the election, no party formed a majority, and a standoff between the left and pro-Kuchma parties occurred for nearly four months before the election of Oleksandr Tkachenko, a member of the leftist bloc with financial connections to Kuchma's government, as Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. Following the election, two of Kuchma's major political opponents (Pavlo Lazarenko and Oleksandr Moroz) were either forced to leave the country amidst corruption charges or subjected to a campaign of media harassment. The election highlighted the civil rights of Crimean Tatars, which continued to be in flux amidst their repatriation from Central Asia.
Background Ukraine became independent in 1991, amidst the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The period since 1991 had, by 1998, been marked by an economic crisis. At the peak of this crisis, during the previous parliamentary election in 1994, doubts existed as to the feasibility of Ukraine's survival as an independent state, according to political scientists Sarah Birch and Andrew Wilson. After Leonid Kuchma was elected as president that year, some improvements in the political situation began to take place. In particular were Russia–Ukraine relations, which had been strained as a result of disputes over the status of Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet, the supply of energy to Ukraine, and Ukraine's post-Soviet nuclear arsenal, which Kuchma saw relinquished with the finalisation of the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine adopted a post-Soviet constitution in June 1996, with later amendments formally dating the next parliamentary election to March 1998.
The primary basis of Kuchma's support were the emerging business oligarchs (particularly the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia, a group of oligarchic and organised crime elements from Kuchma's native Dnipropetrovsk Oblast), and his presidency marked a "virtual corporate takeover" of Ukraine, according to Wilson. He had also initially been elected with the support of the left, who opposed the nation-building policies of Leonid Kravchuk. Kuchma's programme, however, had based in economic liberalisation from the outset of his 1994 campaign, and efforts to reform Ukraine's economy intensified in the period prior to the election. This led leftists to abandon their original support of Kuchma early into his presidency, characterising him as a puppet of the International Monetary Fund. Oleksandr Moroz, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada before 1998 and leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, was a strong opponent of Kuchma's privatisations and the IMF, while Kuchma's links to international organisations such as the IMF and positive relations with the West buoyed his support. Continued poor economic performance was a leading factor in the election; a poll two weeks prior to the election indicted that 66.2% of respondents viewed Kuchma's economic reforms as a failure, and the two most pressing issues to voters polled were non-payment of wages by the state (33.5%) and unemployment (27.2%).
At 9.5%, the third-largest issue for voters was corruption. Kuchma's presidency was marked by the growth of the Ukrainian mafia, with several formerly-communist officials from eastern Ukraine engaging with crime interests in order to enrich themselves. Another poll, conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, indicated that 59.6% of Ukrainians believed "almost all" or "most" People's Deputies were corrupt. Several parties were front organisations for major oligarchic-crime clans, including Hromada (tied to an anti-Kuchma branch of the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia led by Pavlo Lazarenko and Yulia Tymoshenko), the Razom coalition (comprising the Party of Labour and the Liberal Party of Ukraine, representing the Donetsk Clan), the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) (connected to the Kyiv Seven and the ownership of FC Dynamo Kyiv) and the Party of Greens (which, despite having been founded as a legitimate party, was effectively sold by the party's leadership to banking interests prior to the election). Even parties which were not fronts for oligarchic or crime interests, such as the centre-right People's Movement of Ukraine (, abbreviated Rukh) and the leftist parties, had seats on their proportional representation lists occupied by individuals associated with such groups.
Electoral system The 1994 parliamentary election used a two-round system based on previous Soviet laws that had been designed for the one-party state, including stipulations that 50% of voters in each constituency turn out and that the successful candidate had one more vote than 50% of the turnout. The results of this system had been chaotic, with constituencies taking as many as five rounds to elect a People's Deputy. A year after the 1994 election, 10% of seats in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) remained unfilled, and some were still vacant by the time of the 1998 election.
Following the chaos of the 1994 election, all parties save for the Communist Party of Ukraine (, abbreviated KPU) agreed that electoral reform was needed to establish a stable democratic system and simplify the electoral process. Early discussions on electoral reform focused on a mixed-member proportional representation similar to that which had been adopted by Russia for elections to the State Duma in 1993. The KPU initially opposed any adoption of proportional representation, but later supported it after recognising that proportional representation would be likely to increase the amount of seats they held in the Verkhovna Rada. The electoral reform law, adopted in September 1997, provided for a 50/50 split of seats in the Rada between single-member districts and party-list proportional representation seats, with the latter having a threshold of 4%. All turnout requirements were abolished as a result of the electoral reform, and, rather than crossing out all candidates which they opposed of (as was the system under the Soviet-era laws), voters were required to simply select the candidate they supported.
After the election, a number of provisions in the election reform were declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine. These provisions were later amended.
Electoral campaign The eleven major parties had widely varying political positions during the electoral campaign, with most being opposed to Kuchma's government. The eight parties ultimately elected into the Verkhovna Rada's proportional representation seats professed the following policies: Communist Party of Ukraine (, KPU): abolition of the presidency of Ukraine; establishment of the Russian language as the second state language of Ukraine; Ukrainian accession to the Union State; opposition to the economic liberalisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and NATO. The party's leader is Petro Symonenko. People's Movement of Ukraine (, Rukh): opposition to Kuchma's government and the left; support for economic and political reforms; pro-Western and centre-right. Highly-placed candidates on its party list included Viacheslav Chornovil (the party's leader and a former prisoner of conscience held by the Soviet Union), Minister of Foreign Affairs Hennadiy Udovenko, writer Ivan Drach and Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev. Socialist Party – Peasant Party (, SPU–SelPU): Strengthened relations with members of the Commonwealth of Independent States; state control of critical industries; opposition to privatisation of land. As a political alliance, it included members of both the Socialist Party of Ukraine (led by Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Oleksandr Moroz) and the Peasant Party of Ukraine (led by Kateryna Vashchuk and also including Rouslan Bodelan and Anatoliy Franchuk); the two parties at times held divergent views, with the Peasant Party being pro-Kuchma. Party of Greens of Ukraine (, PZU): Reduction of taxes; abolition of conscription; international neutrality; environmentalism. People's Democratic Party (, NDP): Privatisation; market economy; abolition of parliamentary immunity; European integration while retaining positive relations with Russia and members of the CIS. It was very pro-Kuchma. Hromada (): 50% reduction of taxes; restructuring of the executive government; anti-corruption. The party was largely a personal vehicle for Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and a front organisation for the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia. Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (, PSPU): abolition of the presidency; recognition of Belarus and Russia as Ukraine's strategic partners; granting worker cooperatives the exclusive right to nominate candidates for People's Deputies; strongly anti-IMF, anti-World Bank and anti-NATO; opposed to both the KPU and SPU–SelPU on the basis that neither were sufficiently left-wing. Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) (, SDPU(o)): Centrism; full employment; European integration while retaining positive relations with Russia. The party was a front organisation for the Kyiv Seven, and contained several national communist figures, including former President Leonid Kravchuk and former Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk.
Interventions by Kuchma
Despite only vaguely advising voters to vote "against the left", Kuchma and individuals close to him have been accused by Birch and Wilson of significantly intervening in the 1998 election, both in order to create a spoiler effect for leftist parties and to ensure the victory of the pro-government People's Democratic Party, which was intended to exist as a people's party under the leadership of Prime Minister Valeriy Pustovoitenko.
Many of the parties contesting the election were intended to spoil the results of the leftist bloc. Among these was the Agrarian Party (established in opposition to the Peasant Party's then-undisputed control over the rural population) and three parties and political alliances were founded with the support of the government with the intention of undermining the KPU's support among trade unions and veterans. The KPU and SPU–SelPU accused the PSPU of being directly created and supported by Kuchma's government, and Communist and Socialist media regularly attacked it as such.