Democratic Party of Ukraine

Democratic Party of Ukraine (Демократична партія України, or ДемПУ; Demokratychna partiia Ukrainy, or DemPU). A Ukrainian political party which made its initial appearance at the end of the Soviet era but within a decade was eliminated from the electoral arena. It was established in Kyiv in December 1990 by a group of activists of the Popular Movement of Ukraine after that movement had turned down their proposal to transform itself into a full-fledged political party. Yurii Badzo was elected head; others in the leadership included Dmytro Pavlychko, Yu. Tsekhov, Vitalii Donchyk, M. Shvaika, and I. Yushchuk. On 28 June 1991 the party obtained official registration; it had 3,015 members. In December 1992 Volodymyr Yavorivsky was elected head and re-elected in 1994. By early 1996 the party included 3,800 members.

The party espoused human rights, family, nation, and state as priorities. It supported a presidential-parliamentary system with strict separation of powers, property ownership as the basis of a healthy economy, development of private farming and conversion of state and collective farms into co-operatives or shareholding associations, and, in foreign relations, integration of Ukraine into the European security system and co-operation with NATO. In the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR elected in 1990, the DemPU caucus consisted of 25 deputies, the largest organized single party contingent in opposition to the Communist Party of Ukraine. From then on, the party fell on hard times. After 1994 its representation in the Supreme Council of Ukraine was reduced to three. In 1998 it formed an electoral alliance with the Party of Economic Rebirth known as the Bloc of Democratic Parties-NEP (Narodovladdia, Ekonomika, Poriadok, or People Power, Economy, and Order), and sponsored 172 candidates. Its orientation during the second term of President Leonid Kuchma was pro-presidential. The bloc as a whole obtained only 1.2 percent of the vote for political party lists, below the threshold for representation on that half of the ballot; one lone Democrat was elected in a single-member district. In view of these results, the party thereafter tried to create new alliances with other political parties but was itself wracked by internal factionalism and suffered steady decline in popularity along with increasing irrelevance.

In the 2002 elections to the Supreme Council of Ukraine, DemPU formed an electoral alliance with the Democratic Union; this combined bloc obtained 0.9 percent of the vote on the PR ballot, but picked up four SMD seats. In 2006 it joined forces with three other parties in the Bloc of Democratic Parties which gained less than 0.5 percent of the votes and no seats. In 2007 it combined with two others in the Liudmyla Suprun Bloc which gained one-third of one percent of the vote. Suprun herself collected less than one-fifth of one percent of the vote as a candidate for the president of Ukraine in 2010. The party did not contest the 2012 parliamentary elections.

Bohdan Harasymiw

[This article was written in 2025.]