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BBC Monitoring Service Research, UK, Friday, May 7, 2004
If Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz stands for president this year, this
will be his third presidential campaign. The veteran opposition figure has
been in the top echelon of Ukrainian politics since the late 1980s, and an
MP since 1990. He is perhaps the most experienced and consistent opponent
of President Leonid Kuchma.
Moroz was born into a peasant family in Kiev Region in 1944. Educated as
an agricultural engineer, he worked in the countryside until the mid-1970s,
when he became a Communist functionary. Elected to Ukraine's parliament
shortly before the Soviet Union break-up, Moroz headed the Communist
majority in the legislature until the August 1991 coup in Moscow, when the
Communist Party was temporarily banned. |
Oleksandr Moroz
(www.ArtUkraine.com photo)
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Moroz then founded the Socialist Party of Ukraine, whose leader he has been
ever since. As parliament speaker in 1994-98, Moroz was the staunchest
opponent of Kuchma's economic reforms, which he believed were too radical.
He has consistently opposed land privatization. He also opposed Kuchma's
earlier attempts to strengthen the presidency vis-a-vis parliament both in
the constitution preparation process in 1996 and in the abortive
constitutional referendum in April 2000.
After Moroz twice came third in two presidential races - in 1994 and 1999 -
many observers thought his best years in politics were in the past. But in
November 2000 Kuchma's fugitive bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko chose
Moroz to publicize at a news conference the scandalous records, which, as
Melnychenko claimed, were secretly made in Kuchma's office.
The records implicated Kuchma in the kidnapping of opposition journalist
Heorhiy Gongadze and physical intimidation of political opponents. Moroz
spearheaded the "Ukraine Without Kuchma" movement, which demanded
Kuchma's resignation. The president denied the accusations and the movement
did not achieve its goal, but it was a major comeback into big politics for
Moroz.
Moroz has always believed that parliament should be stronger than the
president, so he wholeheartedly supported the constitutional reform
proposals aimed at redistributing authority between parliament and the
president in favour of the former, which Kuchma tabled last year.
This drove a wedge between Moroz and the right-of-centre opposition
leaders, Viktor Yushchenko and Yuliya Tymoshenko, who believe in a
strong presidency. Moroz, who had been widely expected to back
Yushchenko in the election, is now likely to stand for president for a
third time.
Moroz and his Socialist Party essentially express the interests of
smallholders and small and medium-sized businesses. Central Ukraine, where
the small-scale economy dominates, has been the Socialists' natural
stronghold. Moroz's leftist convictions - he still marches under red banners
on 1 May - however, recurrently prevented him from winning the hearts and
minds of the electorate in the conservative west of Ukraine.
But Moroz's attitude to the Soviet past is rather pragmatic. "Whoever isn't
sorry about the demise of the USSR has no heart, and whoever thinks about
its resurrection has no head," he once wrote.
Moroz is married and has two daughters. His hobbies include poetry and
chess.
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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