Politics and Political Parties

In the late 1980s, when the Communist Party began to lose influence, the first non-communist political groups appeared. However, the Communist Party was Ukraine’s only legal party until its constitutional monopoly was abolished in 1990. The Communist Party was banned from 1991 to 1993, but by 1994 it was Ukraine’s largest party. More than 40 political parties were officially registered in the mid-1990s, most of which had only several thousand members. Ukraine’s entire party system is poorly developed, and its political parties lack local organisation and grassroots support. The electoral system allows workers’ collectives to nominate candidates for the legislature, thus weakening the role of parties in the electoral process. As a result, 114 of the legislature’s members elected in 1998 had no party affiliation. Of the parties represented in the 1998 elections to the legislature, the Communist Party won the most seats, while the People’s Movement of Ukraine, known as Rukh, won the second largest number of seats. In general, Ukraine’s political parties fall into four categories: extremenationalists, such as the Ukrainian National Assembly; moderate nationalists, such as Rukh, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Ukrainian Republican Party; centrists, such as the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party; and the left, such as the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Peasants’ Party of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Socialist Party.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20