When the first presidents began appearing in the former Soviet expanses from the Western side around 1990, voices of bewilderment could be heard—what kind of nonsense is this, why do you even need it? By that time, political science had established it as almost a given that the president and the presidential republic constitute a strictly American phenomenon, not replicable under other conditions. It goes without saying that plenty of people bear the title “president,” but functionally they are either monarchs—where succession to the throne was abolished (Europe)—or dictators (the rest of the world). If you want “like in the USA,” believing that the entire secret lies in the presidential office, you’d better calm down, because you will also have to do a great many other things along the way, and there is no guarantee they will work. Such was the signal from the West, but, understandably, it was not heard—fashion is fashion—and those who remember those times will confirm that there was simply nowhere to turn from presidents. Almost everyone was a president.
I am as far as possible from the idea that some correct state position could bring people happiness and joy. However, there are positions that, due to a certain specificity, cause particularly great harm. And they should be abolished precisely for this reason. And, of course, this is a short-term, tactical task—neither “welfare,” nor “economic growth,” nor even “stability” benefits from its solution—but it must be solved, because the consequences of not solving it can be extremely unpleasant.
So. Everyone has already understood that we are talking about the position of the Ukrainian president. Since this is a column, not a treatise, I will limit myself to three main reasons, in my view, why the presidential position should be abolished.
The first reason. It is not that kind of president. The American president heads the entire executive branch and forms the cabinet himself. This is also the reason why he is elected. Let us assume that this position is “effective”—at least in the USA it began to cause serious harm only about 150 years after its creation, that is, under the second Roosevelt. However, our president has nothing in common with this, except for general elections. He simply bears the same name as the American president. The people who called Kravchuk the president had no idea how things worked there and what it all meant (this is simply a statement of fact, not an insult). The presidential position in Ukraine was not “introduced”—that is, copied and transferred—but developed de facto since 1991, through amendments to the Soviet constitution of 1978, the constitutional agreement of 1995, the constitution of 1996, the political reform of 2004 and its cancellation. And how did it develop? Oh, very simply. The president is essentially a complete analogue of the Central Committee First Secretary. He has minimal responsibility and maximum authority. This system was enshrined in the constitution of 1996. That is, “creeping Soviet shit” is prescribed right in our Constitution. This is an attempt to cement a certain type of relations and a certain method of plunder. It is understood that there is no capitalism among us not because of the president. But his position and the post-Soviet system into which it is integrated quite nicely hinder this very capitalism.
Let us add that “fixing” this position, making it “like in America” will not work. Mexico at one time literally copied the US constitution, including federalism—the results are unconvincing. However, even if it were possible (assuming we believe that positions bring benefits), there is a second reason why the presidential position should be abolished.
The second reason. Ideally for splitting the country. Once again, it is a commonplace in political science that a president elected by general elections promotes the establishment of a two-party system in the country. The more real power is concentrated in the president’s hands and the more hopes people place on him, the faster this process goes. We have been living from the very beginning under the influence of “anti-Russian” and “pro-Russian” parties, whatever they may be called at this historical juncture. The main reason for their appearance was the accidental independence of 1991—everything else in this problem follows from this fact; political discourse is still defined by the “Russian question.” The trouble is that the supporters of these parties are not distributed evenly, but concentrated in different regions. With each presidential election, this two-party system only strengthens, and now it literally threatens to tear the country apart.
The third reason. Nothing can be done with the discourse. Politics in democracies is mobilization of supporters (and, as a consequence, distancing from everyone else). This is the reason the presidential office leads to two-party politics, and it is also the reason the discourse works for self-perpetuation and cannot be changed within the system. To win presidential elections, you must get a majority of votes. Presidential elections are two-candidate races—to win, each candidate must maximally mobilize his supporters. The same story applies, by the way, to majoritarian parliamentary elections, which also lead to a two-party system.
So—if you have some ready-made electoral mobilization toolkit, however small, in the form of, say, “pro-Russian” or “anti-Russian” party rhetoric, you will always build your campaign around one or the other of these rhetorical frameworks. Everything else will be drawn to them, and the more people the election campaign covers, the less maneuver you have and the less choice the electorate has. This does not even depend on the desire of the candidate and his team—it is a property of the system: you either use it or you lose. And I think there is no need to explain that the averaging goes by the simplest set of values, since… um… there are more simple people than non-simple ones. It works out this way because we do not profess some single value—usually it is a certain set, and moreover internally ranked (that is, when choosing, you reject from your set the value that is less valuable to you). For example, if there is a cohesive small group having values a, b, c, then everyone else in whose value hierarchies these letters occupy the first positions (with ‘a’ most important, ‘c’ least) will end up in the orbit of this group, and when voting will largely support it, since they know that the one who gets the majority of votes wins.
That is, it is simply impossible to win elections on “new ideas,” despite the fact that there may be very many people sharing these ideas and it would even be theoretically possible to constitute a majority from them. Therefore, the searches for “a third force” have failed (and will continue to fail), and therefore the choice always comes down to choosing “the lesser evil.”
In our situation, all this is doubly sad. Roughly speaking, no one will work for unification if they receive votes from division. The political discourse—all this pro-anti-Russian agenda—is a thing of the past; it has no resolution whatsoever. It arose because different regions of the country found themselves at the moment of independence at different points in historical time. If independence had been, as they say, “earned,” then the Russian agenda would have been exhausted at the moment of its attainment. But instead it turned out that half the country simply did not notice independence, while for the other half it represented a hyper-value. Accordingly, already the second presidential election (1994) was built on this conflict, and all subsequent ones only inflamed it. All newly emerging problems automatically get attached to this agenda (for example, EU-Customs Union) or are ignored if they cannot be inserted into it. As a result, this irresolvable agenda grabs us by the legs, head and other places; it brings scoundrels to power, threatens civil conflict and the splitting of the country. It is high time something was done about this. And the first step here is to eliminate one of the main causes of all this—the position of the tsar-president, the friend of “ours” and the victor of “yours.”