With the beginning of the election process in Ukraine, many politicians rouse public demand for authoritarianism, MP Oleksandr Feldman considers.
He wrote about this on his blog on gordonua.com website.
“Now, I am talking even not about the specific rhetoric of the authorities, where the words “to guarantee order and security” should be understood as “to restrict rights and intensify control”. There are the candidates today, who openly declare that Ukraine needs authoritarianism with its “strong hand”… It is a dangerous demand: when the society levels the importance of rights and freedoms for the benefit of “order,” there will always be those who offers to the society a “new order”, which has nothing in common with democracy and human values,” the MP writes.
Mr. Feldman notes that today, Ukraine enters a two-year phase of continual elections – the president, parliamentary and local ones.
“It is very important to remember about the values of freedom and democracy, for the country not to have to pay with blood on the streets for its irresponsible choice later,” the MP writes.
According to his opinion, our country pays insufficient attention to the issues of protection of human rights, freedom of speech, protection of the rights of entrepreneurs and defending other freedoms. And Ukraine’s low 83rd place in the global Democracy Index is a clear indication of this.
“And I would like to read in the presidential programmes of the candidates the specific mechanisms of bringing Ukraine to the top 50 countries according to the observance of human rights, the ease of doing business, the freedom of the press. In my view, the key task of the team that wins the presidential and parliamentary elections is to build the society of responsible owners in Ukraine. Not the society of some subsidy receivers who totally depend on the state in everything, but the society of citizens who understand their responsibility for own life. Freedom and responsibility are always two sides of the same coin. And only by teaching Ukrainian society the “culture of freedom” the authorities will be able to carry out real reforms. While the main reform is the change of the relationships between the state and the citizen,” Mr. Feldman writes.
