Unofficial Translation

Image-makers to the rescue

By Vitaly Sych
February 21, 2002

Playing paintball with the media, hopping cheap trains in the provinces, barraging voters with flashy advertising: It’s election time, and politicians are chasing votes.

The growing use of professional image-makers has made Ukrainian politicians and parties more sophisticated and savvy, observers say.

Myron Wasylyk, vice president and managing director at the Washington-based PBN public relations firm, said many parties now hire political consultants, who use modern campaign and marketing techniques in advertising, media relations and rallies.

Some parties began waging advertising blitzes months before the official election campaign kicked off.

He said parties with no national voter base, such as Yabluko, New Generation and the Greens, launched massive advertising campaigns last fall to raise party recognition before the official campaign kicked off on Jan. 1.

“It’s very important psychologically and politically,” he said. “If your party can’t attain 4 percent in sociological polls [the amount required to enter parliament], then you automatically lose interest from the news media and voters, and you risk being labeled as having no chance of winning.”

Winter Crop Generation Team, a bloc of young businessmen and politicians, is relying heavily on a gimmicky promotional campaign to enter parliament. Founded in December, the party is led by 32-year-old businessman and deputy Valery Khoroshkovsky.

The bloc took a novel approach for filling its election list; it launched a nationwide contest to fill positions on its election list. The competition, televised nationwide, brought the bloc exposure. Winter Crop also sponsors events designed to woo the media, like a paintball game between journalists and bloc candidates.

Maksym Karizhsky, the bloc’s spokesman, said Winter Crop’s advertising campaign has focused on the leadership skills of its members and it is being trying to project a new type of politics.

“All the top 20 candidates on our list are a new type of people for Ukrainian politics,” he said. “They even have new faces, different from most other Ukrainian politicians.”

Karizhsky, the bloc’s spokesman, said the campaign is laid out by well-known Russian image-makers Pyotr Shchedrovitsky and Yefim Ostrovsky. Shchedrovitsky and Ostrovsky gained fame by consulting a number of politicians and parties in Russia, including the pro-reform Union of Rightist Forces in 1999 election campaign to the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.

Karizhsky said the two are consulting his bloc on a number of campaign-related issues, including an advertising campaign and public appearances of the bloc’s members.

A $2 million image

Tetyana Shpak, account director at Adell Saatchi & Saatchi said her firm has produced advertisements, handled public relations, conducted sociological research and worked out a campaign strategy for the Green Party. One target of the party’s advertising campaign has been the youth vote, Shpak said. One of the party’s TV ads shows young people dressed in colorful clothes waving together and calls on other youngsters to join and ride the wave.”

The SDPU(u), another contender in the elections, has employed spin doctors to help the party present its best face to potential voters. Oleh Dolzhenkov, SDPU(u) spokesman, said the party hired the Fund for Effective Policy, a Russian political consulting firm, to develop Web sites for the party and its leader Viktor Medvedchuk.

Opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, who employed Russian political consultants in the 1998 parliamentary elections, told Russian Ekspert magazine a full range of services provided by Russian political consulting firms in an election campaign costs around $2 million.

Oleksandr Turchynov, one of the leaders in the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc, said his bloc doesn’t have the resources to hire “well-known” political consultants this time and is relying on its own “analytical group” and members of the bloc.

Polishing or slinging mud

PBN’s Wasylyk, who worked on the election campaigns of former U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan (1984) and George Bush (1988), said the work of image-makers in Ukraine differs from that of those working on election campaigns in Western countries.

“In most countries, image is about perception and positioning,” he said. “In Ukraine, image is about deception.”

While political consultants in other democratic countries try to promote the positive sides of a party or its leader, image-makers in Ukraine focus on mudslinging, he said.

Wasylyk said the approach has changed since the 1998 elections. Now parties and blocs are focusing on promoting only their leaders. In 1998 the parties touted the top five candidates on the list.

Of all the major parties and blocs, SDPU(u) and For a United Ukraine have faced the toughest tasks of turning their leaders into public politicians, he said. Both Medvedchuk and Volodymyr Lytvyn, leader of For a United Ukraine, were little-known to ordinary voters before the elections, which presented a challenge that the candidates handled with varying success.

“My opinion is that Medvedchuk has done a good job of being transformed from oligarch and deputy speaker in parliament to public party leader,” he said.

“On the other hand, my view is that Lytvyn is turning into a disaster.”

He referred to the For a United Ukraine’s fall in opinion polls as a proof.

According to nationwide opinion polls, popular support for the bloc has dwindled from about 6 percent several months ago to around 4 percent now.

Wasylyk, who described Lytvyn as having no political sense, said the bloc would appeal better to voters if it appointed another member as spokesman.

Commuting with the people

The Our Ukraine election bloc, the frontrunner in the polls, didn’t need to work hard on its leader’s image. Viktor Yushchenko was the nation’s most popular politician before the elections began. Yushchenko has instead embarked on an informal campaign to put up a friendly face to the voters. During his campaign tour around Ukraine, Yushchenko took questions from potential voters while traveling on a local commuter train in Chernihiv Oblast. Yushchenko admitted after the trip that he hadn’t ridden such a train for 15 years. In Poltava, Yushchenko joined dancers at a local disco.

SDPU(u), one of Our Ukraine’s election rivals, has chosen another tactic to lure voters. The party has emphasized its affiliation with the world social democratic movement in its advertisements, picturing flashy success stories of the countries governed by social democrats. In one such an advertisement, the party referred to Germany’s post-war economic revival when social democrats came to power in the country.

“Our ideology has a 150-year-old history,” said the SDPU(u)’s Dolzhenkov. “Can you tell me the ideology of the blocs that emerged right before the elections?”