If one can kill “two hares with a single shot” according to a Ukrainian saying, why not four ? On this 26th of March, the election day, what an overwhelming mess at the polling stations...
If one can kill “two hares with a single shot” according to a Ukrainian saying, why not four ? On this 26th of March, the election day, what an overwhelming mess at the polling stations. Ukrainians come up to ballot boxes to elect a trifling number of four candidates : to the Parliament, to the regional Council, to the town Council and for the mayor’s office.
Four unending lists of candidates for the first large electoral meeting in Ukraine since the Orange Revolution. In spite of the overall disenchantment a year after, Ukrainians intend to benefit from the democratic impulse in their country in order to express their choice.
Far from the hustle and bustle, some voters are waiting for their turn in an un-typically silent polling station. These voters, the “zeks,” are in prison and are participating only in parliamentary elections. At first sight the choice seems simpler, yet it is difficult to make a decision in a host of 45 parties, when so many other preoccupations can be discerned on the prisoners’ inscrutable countenances. However, despite a notorious reputation of the Ukrainian prison world, prisoners detainees retain their civic rights, namely that of voting. A luxury in the international penal system.
A useful practice under the former corrupted authoritarian regime in Ukraine, when the prisoners under pressure would give their votes for the candidates close to power.
Today, those in prisons and detention centers are not excluded from social debates, yet they remain poorly informed and shut off behind bars from civic education. The presence of observers and the warders’ vigilant eye are there to guarantee proper elections, but the old demons seem never to be far away.
Pavel Rotar is a socialist and one of those Ukrainian observers sent by his Party to every polling station. On that day he will have carried out his duty in a jail, before going to cast his vote in his constituency in Brovary, a town of 100,000 inhabitants, near Kyiv. A few days later, Brovary’s electoral commission will declare the election of Brovary mayor invalid…
The itinerary of an observer in Brovary. © Cyril Horiszny
