Martial law in Ukraine could be a death sentence for his democracy

Maxim Eristavi is a Ukrainian journalist and non-resident researcher on the Atlantic Council.

This morning, I woke up with a thought in mind: the fate of democracy in my country can be decided by a vote on which I have no control. The Ukrainian President and the Ukrainian Parliament have just joined legislation that could mark the beginning of the end of the democratic institutions for which so many people have fought and died.

The bill that President Petro Poroshenko sent to parliament and passed by lawmakers on Monday gives the president vast powers, but Poroshenko assured the people that he would not use it to suppress civil liberties. But are we all comfortable believing his word?

There is no doubt that Ukraine is right to demand a stronger global response to Russia's continuing violations of sovereignty and borders. Moscow is responsible for the death of thousands of Ukrainian citizens, directly or by proxy. Since the annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin in 2014, we have experienced the most brutal violations of international law on the European continent for decades – and the international response has been disappointing. The Kremlin is striving to undermine our democracy, to break the Ukrainians' European ambitions and to bring Ukraine back under Russian colonial control.

Even so, the decision to introduce martial law will help Russian President Vladimir Putin reach his goals even more quickly than his own military bullying. The fragile democracy of Ukraine may not survive it. Poroshenko suspended the election campaign for the first vote since the Maidan revolution in 2014, which promised a peaceful change of power. Having lost all popular support (and reducing polling stations to historically low levels), he now has full emergency powers.

In the past, the Ukrainian government had not resorted to martial law during the most extreme episodes of Russian aggression. As bad as the current crisis is, it can hardly compete with the worst moments of the war, such as the annexation of Crimea or the Avdiivka offensive in 2017, during which tens of thousands of people have been threatened with death and starvation.

We can not entrust arbitrary powers to a president who has continued to engage in politics with the same oligarchs who have ruled the country as their personal fiefdom for the past two decades. We can not trust a president who consistently fails to guarantee the protection of journalists, whistleblowers, civil society activists and minorities, and who still refuses to divulge the details of his recent meetings with Putin's right-hand man. Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk.

Nor can we ignore the overall experience. The history of the flirtation between democracy and martial law in other democracies contains two lessons: first, even "limited" exception powers tend to be prolonged. Second, unconsolidated democracies (such as Ukraine) rarely survive the assignment of such powers to their leaders – just look at recent developments in Turkey, Thailand and the Philippines.

Even if Ukrainian democracy survives the 30 days of martial law, it will suffer serious damage. The interruption of the election campaign will undermine any legitimacy that Poroshenko can still claim, as his unlimited powers will give him a head start over his competitors. The law will cover nearly half of the Ukrainian population of more than 44 million inhabitants, which will create countless opportunities for manipulation in major pivotal voting areas. The president could, in theory, defuse this concern by promising not to run in 2019, an assurance that Ukraine's foreign allies might now want to demand.

Ukraine would not be the first democracy in the region to collapse under the pressure of war. Russian democracy died in the early 2000s when Putin invoked repression in Chechnya to dismantle democratic institutions. But the end of Ukrainian democracy will have toxic effects all over Eastern Europe. The colonial ambitions of Russia will find many fewer obstacles in its path. The kleptocratic elites of other regional democracies facing existential territorial threats – such as Georgia, Moldova or Armenia – may also decide to launch military threats to whitewash the hands of authoritarian rule.

The fact that the Ukrainian parliament has rejected the president's power – reducing his mandate to 60 days and limiting his additional authority to a much smaller territory than he had originally requested – offers a sign of hope. But it would also be wrong to trust Parliament, given its long history of oligarchic influence and its penchant for reducing public procurement.

Ukrainian lawmakers are pleased to have found a compromise between the needs of a free society and a president who needs greater powers to protect the country. But I fear that they could have fatally compromised democracy in the process.