Anyone who’s anyone is running for office in Ukraine

KYIV, Ukraine — What do protest leaders, battlefield commanders, career politicians and muckraking journalists have in common?

They’re all becoming candidates in the country’s parliamentary elections next month.

Iryna Bekeshkina, head of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Kyiv, says the phenomenon of field commanders and other war heroes on the ballot is “in fashion” and resembles previous elections that featured singers, sports icons and other celebrities.

The all-star lineup may sound like a good thing for attracting voters, but some say it’s cause for concern in a country with a track record of hollow populism.

The elections will be crucial for cementing a new pro-reform legislature that would back a planned government overhaul, tackle corruption and institute other changes aimed at staving off economic collapse and battle Russian interference.

Observers are split over how meaningful the new trend might be.

“It’s a small step toward changing the political process,” says political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko.

Everyone from President Petro Poroshenko — whose party tops the popularity charts with around 16 percent support — to grassroots activists are hailing next month’s vote as a partial overhaul of Ukraine’s corrupt political landscape.

Under former President Viktor Yanukovych, much of the legislature was little more than a rubber-stamp body with murky business interests.

Even though last winter’s revolution drove Yanukovych from office, the same lawmakers elected during the 2012 elections remain in place today. Some are alleged even to have supported the Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine.

A new parliament would presumably strengthen the body as a key political institution and help prevent the return of autocratic rule.

It would also reflect the new post-revolutionary order in Ukraine, in which civic activists and the commanders of volunteer battalions — paramilitary units on the front lines in the war with the pro-Russian insurgents — have become the newest media darlings.

Those figures have been celebrated for their roles on the streets of Kyiv and the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. That may be why so many of them have ended up on parties’ voting lists ahead of the elections.

The parties are headed by established politicians, such as Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and their lists include leading investigative journalists, charismatic protest leaders and several field commanders who have gained notoriety for their outspoken criticism of the military leadership.

The tactic of recruiting household names for election lists is commonly used by political parties to boost their popular support, raising questions about the sincerity of some of the candidates.

Particularly curious has been the inclusion of largely symbolic figures with little or no political experience, such as Air Force Col. Yuliy Mamchur, a virtual unknown who made headlines in March after he refused to surrender his Crimea-based unit to Russian soldiers during Moscow’s occupation of the Black Sea peninsula.

Some of those up for election wouldn’t even be able to set foot into the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament building in Kyiv, were they to win seats.

Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian pilot kidnapped by separatists this summer and currently standing trial in Russia for alleged war crimes, tops the election list of former Prime Minster Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party.

Opposition-minded Ukrainians who have sought to maintain pressure on the new authorities to make good on promises of reform criticize what they see as a continuation of Ukraine’s long tradition of personality politics.

Veniamin Tymoshenko, a labor union leader who was demonstrating with about 300 others outside parliament last week, said the new legislature should be “more professional.”

“That means its members should be lawyers, economists — not just populists who show up and say, ‘I fought on the front, vote for me,’” said Tymoshenko, who is not related to the former prime minister.

At the same time, observers say some of the activists who gained celebrity status among protesters following the months-long protests on Independence Square — the “Maidan” — appear to have earned their keep.

They include an anti-corruption crusader who successfully lobbied for a sweeping law aimed at weeding out bureaucrats with spotty records.

There are also reform-minded legal experts, election monitors and journalists who have built their reputations on investigating official graft. Candidates like those, Fesenko says, may be instrumental in “uniting civic interests with new political opportunities.”

Journalist Serhiy Leshchenko, who’s running for a seat on Poroshenko’s party list, said that after his 14 years investigating corruption at the country’s top independent news outlet, Ukrayinska Pravda, he knows “how the schemes work and understand[s] how to dismantle them.”

“Whether or not this will work out — I don’t know, honestly,” he wrote in a Facebook post after announcing his candidacy. “But I have to try. Because later you’ll spend your whole life complaining to yourself that you didn’t make use of the chance.”

Most observers agree that a smooth political transition only seven months after a bloody street revolution is unlikely, especially given the social and economic crises the country currently faces.

Despite so much new blood running for office, many establishment politicians haven’t exactly left the building, but instead help anchor many of the party lists. Even former members of Yanukovych’s ruling Party of Regions — reviled by many for their role in enabling his autocratic regime — are running on different party lists this time around.

The second most popular party in the polls is led by a vigilante nationalist who’s garnered international condemnation for abducting and beating suspected separatist sympathizers on camera.

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But Yevhen Fedchenko, director the Mohyla School of Journalism in Kyiv, says the flood of diverse new faces, particularly the journalists and activists, represents an important shift away from the status quo.

“No one really represented anyone,” he says of the current parliament, which was formally dissolved in August but stayed on to pass key legislation. “It was full of people who represented themselves, their businesses or the businesses of whoever hired them to be there.”

Fedchenko, who knows several of the new candidates, says the system they’re aiming to change is “very powerful” and poses a threat to idealistic newcomers who risk being “caught in the mechanism.”

“But,” he adds, echoing candidate Leshchenko, “they have to try.”