GW Discourse

Instant relevance, just add orange.

In the days following the famously narrow 2000 election between Bush and Gore, headline writers could come to only one conclusion: “Nader Loses.”

Today in Ukraine, the results were similarly inconclusive. Only one thing was certain — incumbent president Viktor Yushchenko had lost his seat, with a slim 5 percent of the vote.

Unsurprisingly, neither the former belle of the revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, nor Kuchma’s favored successor in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, managed a simple majority. This means that next month Ukrainians will head back to the polls for a second round of voting.

Yanukovych beat Yulia in the first round, by a margin of nearly 17 percent. Tymoshenko has already accused Yanukovych of “monsterous fraud, beyond even what happened in 2004.” It sounds like hearkening back to the good old days. Most independent and EU observers have cautiously pronounced the results clean.

The competition is closer than first-round results indicate. As Kyiv Post noted, as the field narrows, Tymoshenko is likely to pick up many of the so-called orange votes that went to Yuschenko and others. What might be likely to thwart her is Yushchenko himself. He’s alleged that Tymoshenko and Yanucovych are both part of a Kremlin-controlled plot. If orange voters stay home, it will mean a Yanucovych victory. Yanucovych and Yushchenko both know this – as Taras Kuzio pointed out in the Eurasia Daily Monitor.

Is Yushchenko capable of Nadering Tymoschenko from the political afterlife? Will the loser of next month’s contest take the news gracefully? Is there a significant difference between the policy decisions we can expect between the two front runners? Ukrainians will answer these questions for themselves in next month’s second round.