Liberal Party of Ukraine (Ліберальна партія України; Liberalna partiia Ukrainy, or ЛПУ; LPU). Minor political party in contemporary Ukraine. Established on 12 September 1991 in Donetsk, the party obtained official registration with a declared membership of 400 the following month. O. Soskin replaced its first leader, I. Markulov in January 1995. In 1996, when membership was estimated to have reached 40,000, Donetsk governor Volodymyr Shcherban was elected leader. The party at that time believed in what it called social liberalism, meaning the natural right of every citizen to life, property, personal freedom, dignity, freedom of expression and information, religious belief, travel, choice of place of work and residence, and political participation. It also believed that the way to economic prosperity was through individual accumulation of wealth and capital, but also that universal social welfare services should be provided. It saw Ukraine as a political, rather than ethnic, nation. Distinctive features of the Liberal program were its advocacy of a bicameral parliament, a more distinct separation of powers, greater decentralization, collaboration between government, business, and trade unions, a professional army, and resolution of the language problem at the regional level while maintaining the Ukrainian language as the official national language.

There were 12 LPU people’s deputies in the Supreme Council of Ukraine in 1994–8. In 1998 the LPU allied with the Labor Party of Ukraine in a bloc labeled Labor Party and Liberal Party—Together! which nominated 219 candidates, but received only 1.9 percent of the party-list vote. It was then perceived as having a pro-presidential orientation, i.e., in favor of Leonid Kuchma. Only one LPU member—Volodymyr Shcherban—was elected in a single-member district. After the elections there was dissatisfaction with Shcherban’s authoritarian leadership style; a possible split in the party was averted, and in December 1998 he was re-elected as leader.

In 1999 the party openly supported the incumbent president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, running for re-election. In the Supreme Council of Ukraine elections of 2002, however, the LPU entered Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine electoral alliance; two of its members were elected from the slate. Some 600 LPU members were said to have been successful in regional and local elections that year. Feeling squeezed out and lacking influence within the bloc, as well as disagreeing over constitutional changes, Volodymyr Shcherban led his party out of Our Ukraine in 2004 going over to the camp of Yushchenko’s main rival, Viktor Yanukovych. In the summer of 2005, Shcherban was replaced as leader by Petro Tsyhanko.

In 2006 the LPU contested the Supreme Council of Ukraine elections independently, but failed to cross the threshold with only 0.4 percent of the vote. It boycotted the 2007 elections mistrustful of their being conducted in an honest and transparent manner. The party put forward I. Markulov, its inaugural leader, as candidate for president of Ukraine in 2010, but he was disqualified for technical reasons. It again contested the Supreme Council elections in 2012 and 2014, but on each occasion obtained less than one percent of the vote for no seats. This despite doubling the number of candidates on the party list from 67 to 121. It did not contest the 2019 elections.

At its congress in 2014, the party elected a new leader, the parliamentarian Volodymyr Opanashchenko, and made Tsyhanko its honorary chief. Opanashchenko resigned from the leadership in 2015 in connection with his contesting the mayoralty of Kherson. Tsyhanko’s sudden death in 2021 brought the party its first female leader, Viktoria Parada.

With its inability to attract voters or to win seats in the Supreme Council of Ukraine, as well as its own liberal adherence to the principles of liberalism, the LPU somehow has managed to stay alive on the margins while playing no significant role in Ukrainian national politics.

Bohdan Harasymiw
[This article was written in 2024.]