Presidential elections were held in Ukraine on 31 October 1999, with a second round on 14 November. The result was a victory for Leonid Kuchma, who defeated Petro Symonenko in the run-off, winning a second consecutive presidential election.
Kuchma, who had been elected on a leftist programme in 1994 before subsequently abandoning it for economic liberalisation, was extremely unpopular prior to the election, with a reputation for patronage and ties to large corporations and organised crime. Two major opponents of Kuchma were unable to compete in the election: Pavlo Lazarenko of the centrist Hromada was arrested in the United States on money laundering and embezzlement charges, while Viacheslav Chornovil, leader of the centre-right Rukh, died in a traffic collision under disputed circumtances. Kuchma's main opponents were Oleksandr Moroz, leader of the centre-left Socialist Party, and far-left candidates Petro Symonenko and Nataliya Vitrenko; Moroz, Kuchma's most significant opponent, was eliminated in the first round, and Kuchma campaigned against the uncharismatic and unpopular Symonenko as a supporter of Russian imperialism and an opponent of Ukrainian independence.
The first round was marked by the Kaniv Four, a quadrumvirate of Moroz and three other candidates who pledged to drop out in support of the highest-polled candidate. The alliance collapsed shortly before the first round of voting, possibly as a result of government interference. A falsified assassination attempt against Vitrenko was also blamed on Moroz. In the second round, Kuchma accused Symonenko of supporting Soviet and Russian atrocities. Symonenko attempted to moderate his position, expressing support for private business and renouncing the possibility of Ukraine joining the Union State, but his appeals were not widely published outside of communist press. Symonenko was largely supported by social conservatives, Pan-Slavists and leftists, while Kuchma benefited from a significant number of voters seeing him as a lesser evil than communism.
Kuchma utilised extensive administrative resources, including state media, the Security Service and the presidential administration, to harass his political opponents and benefit his re-election. He additionally pressured banks and oligarchs to provide him with financial backing. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe referred to the conduct of the election as "a disgrace", noting a media blackout against opposition candidates. Local governments pressured state employees to vote for Kuchma and utilised governmental resources to encourage turnout.
As of 2026, this is the only re-election of an incumbent president in the history of independent Ukraine.
Background
Leonid Kuchma had been elected president of Ukraine in the 1994 election, succeeding Leonid Kravchuk. Kuchma, who came from eastern Ukraine, initially ran on a leftist campaign of opposition to Ukrainian nationalism and bilingualism between the Ukrainian and Russian languages. After being elected, however, Kuchma abandoned his previous leftist rhetoric and supported Kravchuk's policies of nation-building, though he abandoned Kravchuk's emphasis on ethnic and linguistic nationalism for civic nationalist policies and placed increased attention on economic concerns, which Kuchma and his advisers viewed as hindering nation-building.
Prior to the election, Kuchma was extremely unpopular; a March 1999 poll from The Day, a Kyivan newspaper, registered 7% of voters as trusting Kuchma, and a November 1998 poll from The Day indicated that 31% of voters said they would never vote for him, the highest number above all candidates. In the 1998 parliamentary election, the two main pro-Kuchma parties (the People's Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united)) together gathered less than 10% of the vote.
Corporate rule and instability
Since 1991, Ukraine's political system had been dominated by a political system of cooperation between the centre-right national democrats and "centrist" corporate groups in an informal coalition against the left. The national democrats, who emerged from the Ukraine's Soviet dissidents, recognised its inability to govern Ukraine on its own and accepted the dominance of corporate groups over the state in return for maintaining policies of Ukrainianisation and the granting of important ministries to the national democrats. The "centrist" bloc was dominated by three oligarchic "clans", which dated back to the Soviet era and were based along geographic lines: the Kyiv Clan, the Dnipropetrovsk Clan and the Donetsk Clan. Kuchma belonged to the Dnipropetrovsk Clan.
Historian Andrew Wilson argues that Kuchma's election as president "inaugurated a virtual corporate takeover of the state" from the national-democratic intellectuals and national communists that had guided Kravchuk's presidency. According to Wilson, Kuchma "soon gained notoriety" for his widespread usage of patronage. Additional accusations of ties to organised crime dogged Kuchma, namely that his 1994 campaign had been partially financed by companies Seabeco and Nordex, which were tied to members of the Ukrainian mafia and the Russian Solntsevskaya Bratva and were involved in arms trafficking to Iran and North Korea.
Like Kravchuk before him, Kuchma's presidency had been marked by governmental instability; Vitaliy Masol, an opponent of reform and a Kravchuk appointee, was originally retained as prime minister before being removed after half a year. Yevhen Marchuk, Kuchma's first appointed prime minister, resigned ostensibly due to obtaining a mandate as a People's Deputy of Ukraine (though academic Bohdan Harasymiw says that Kuchma's uneasiness with Marchuk's popularity led to Kuchma forcing his resignation), while his successor, Pavlo Lazarenko, resigned due to "ill health" amidst a large-scale corruption scandal. Lazarenko in turn was replaced by Valeriy Pustovoitenko, a leader of the pro-Kuchma People's Democratic Party who was a member of the Dnipropetrovsk Clan.
Lazarenko scandal
Pavlo Lazarenko, governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and a member of Kuchma's Dnipropetrovsk Clan, was appointed as prime minister in late May 1996. Soon after being appointed, it became evident that Lazarenko was involved in massive money laundering. Utilising government resources, Lazarenko transferred as much as 50% of Ukraine's gross domestic product and US$700 million to Dnipropetrovsk Clan businesses linked to him. It is unclear whether Lazarenko acted independently or was assisted by Kuchma in laundering money. Local business leaders (namely natural gas trader Yulia Tymoshenko) were also implicated in Lazarenko's network, which was being used to fund a political movement for Lazarenko. Kuchma was pressured by Western diplomats to remove Lazarenko, and he eventually did so in July 1997.
Concerns about the scale and publicity of Lazarenko's corruption were not the sole reason for his removal; Kuchma was also concerned about Lazarenko's political popularity. After being removed as prime minister, Lazarenko founded the centrist Hromada party in opposition to Kuchma. The party was successful at the 1998 election, winning 40 seats, and Kuchma and his allies began devoting their attention to destroying the party.
The Prosecutor General of Ukraine launched an investigation into Lazarenko in January 1997. He was subpoenaed by the Prosecutor General's office in March 1998, but failed to appear. An attempt to lift his parliamentary immunity at the time did not succeed. In December 1998, Lazarenko was arrested while entering Switzerland and charged with money laundering. His bail was posted and he returned to Ukraine before again fleeing to the United States ahead of a 17 February 1999 vote that successfully lifted his parliamentary immunity. There, he was arrested on a fraudulent Argentine visa and accused of embezzling US$2 million, obtaining 2 million hryvnias in kickbacks and laundering 4.4 million Swiss francs and US$1.1 million through foreign bank accounts. Hromada, which had nominated him for the presidency shortly before his flight from Ukraine, soon collapsed, with his erstwhile ally Tymoshenko forming the breakaway Batkivshchyna party.
That Lazarenko was a significant political opponent of Kuchma prior to his flight from Ukraine has led to controversy about the extent to which prosecution was motivated by political, rather than legal, grievances. Olena Nikolayenko says that "it is generally believed" that Lazarenko's presidential ambitions, as well as a struggle with Kuchma over control of the Dnipropetrovsk clan, were the main causes of his flight from Ukraine. Harasymiw argues that whether the prosecution of Lazarenko politically-motivated is irrelevant as a result of the intertwining of politics, business and organised crime in Ukraine. The alliance between Lazarenko and Socialist Party of Ukraine leader Oleksandr Moroz was utilised by Kuchma to attack Moroz, subjecting him to harassment from state media and tax authorities in order to discredit him during the 1999 campaign.
While his mandate had been one to pursue anti-nationalist and bilingual policies, Kuchma sought to govern on a programme of economic liberalism. Kravchuk's first term had been dominated by economic liberalisation, debates over the adoption of the constitution of Ukraine and increased corruption. Kuchma's liberalisation efforts, led by Viktor Pynzenyk and Viktor Yushchenko, culminated in a 1996 monetary reform and austerity policies that reduced deficit spending and hyperinflation. These reforms, which were opposed by both large enterprises (on the basis that austerity had led to reduced corporate subsidies) and the leftist-dominated Verkhovna Rada (the parliament of Ukraine, which accused Kuchma of abandoning his previous leftist programme in favour of policies supported by the International Monetary Fund), were eventually abandoned after 1996, though Kuchma continued to insist that he supported such policies.
By 1999, most major economic problems remained unresolved, and the post-independence economic depression continued: issues of land ownership, large state-owned enterprises, high unemployment (growing to as much as one-third of the workforce by 2002) and low wages (equivalent to US$40 per month) remained important issues for the electorate. While GDP contraction had declined from a peak of 12.2% in 1995, with comparatively minor contractions of 3% in 1997, 1.9% in 1998 and 0.2% in 1999, perceptions of the economy as poorly-performing continued to hamper Kuchma's popularity.
Split in Rukh, Chornovil's death
The centre-right People's Movement of Ukraine (Ukrainian: Народний Рух України, romanised: Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy, abbreviated Rukh) was a significant political force leading up to the 1999 election. The party's leader, former political prisoner Viacheslav Chornovil, was "the "main threat to power" for Kuchma according to human rights activist Adrian Karatnycky. At the Ninth Congress of Rukh in December 1998, Chornovil published the party's campaign strategy, advocating for greater focus on increasing support among the electorates of eastern and southern Ukraine. At the same congress, Chornovil declared his candidacy for the presidency, alongside Hennadiy Udovenko. The final candidate of Rukh was to be determined at a later date.
Rukh was increasingly split between Chornovil's supporters and those who disapproved of him, with both sides feeling that the other was too close to Kuchma's government. Chornovil's supporters additionally accused the anti-Chornovil faction of being supported by the oligarchs and blamed Kuchma for organising the split, while his opponents saw Chornovil as disrespectful of party rules and accused him of an authoritarian leadership style. Yuriy Kostenko, a member of Rukh who had served as Minister of Environmental Protection in the Pustovoitenko government, removed Chornovil as leader of the parliamentary group of Rukh in a vote by the party's deputies before launching an effort to replace Chornovil as party leader. This infighting weakened the party ahead of the 1999 election. Hai-Nyzhnyk states that Chornovil withdrew his candidacy for the presidency in January 1999, while Taras Chornovil states that he was campaigning for president until his death.
On 25 March 1999, Chornovil was killed in a traffic collision near Boryspil International Airport while returning from a campaign speech in the city of Kirovohrad (now Kropyvnytskyi) when his car crashed into a lorry blocking the highway. The driver of the lorry was charged with recklessness and sentenced to prison before being amnestied. An investigation to determine whether Chornovil had been assassinated was launched in 2005, after the end of Kuchma's presidency. Investigations into Chornovil have since been repeatedly closed and reopened without consensus on whether or not he was assassinated.
Candidates
According to Ukrainian electoral law, candidates may be nominated by a political party, an alliance of parties or a group of voters. Under the law, 200 delegates of a party or alliance must affirm the nomination of a candidate, while a meeting of 500 voters was necessary to nominate an independent candidate. Unlike previous elections, the 1999 elections required all candidates to obtain one million signatures, with 30,000 of these signatures coming from two-thirds of the twenty-six regions of Ukraine.
Fifteen candidates were initially nominated, of whom two (Kuchma and Yevhen Marchuk) were independents. Two of the candidates (Oleksandr Tkachenko and Volodymyr Oliinyk) dropped out, in line with a declaration made by the members of the Kaniv Four (comprising both of them alongside Marchuk and Oleksandr Moroz of the Socialist Party of Ukraine) to drop out in favour of the leading candidate. Political scientist Sarah Birch lists the final 13 candidates as being placed in the following political alignments:
In addition, Birch does not note two of the final candidates (Oleksandr Rzhavskyy and Mykola Haber) as being aligned with the left, right or centre. She further describes Kuchma and Marchuk as "centre-right".