The Orange glow

JUST 16 MONTHS AGO, UKRAINE, one of Europe’s largest countries, stood more or less where basket-case Belarus found itself last week -- with a thuggish president declared the victor in an election most every outside observer not named Vladimir V. Putin considered unfree and unfair, while thousands of demonstrators braved the cold, night after night, to demand a new vote. With four NATO member states on its border and a nuclear arsenal only recently disbanded (at least in theory), this was no insignificant standoff, either for the world or for Ukraine’s 47 million citizens.

But unlike Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko this week, Ukraine’s leader at the time, Leonid D. Kuchma, grudgingly tolerated a new election -- and allowed the protesters to assemble in the streets without being clubbed viciously by the regime’s cops. Opposition leaders won the rerun vote, and though they quickly began squabbling among themselves, the Orange Revolution they set in motion in November 2004 reached its official fruition last weekend, ironically enough with the numerical parliamentary victory for Kuchma’s handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovich.

How does that work? Simple. A free and fair election is free and fair, regardless of who wins. And, fortunately enough, Yanukovich’s Party of Regions doesn’t seem to have enough votes to form a working government, meaning that the two splintered Orange Revolution parties -- both at least nominally inclined toward Western-oriented liberalism -- probably will form a coalition government. It’s no wonder that President Viktor Yushchenko, whose party finished a distant and disappointing third in the polling, nevertheless declared: “I’m in a great mood. I’m sure that democratic elections in Ukraine are a victory in themselves.”

Ukraine’s firm step in the right direction is proof that even countries for which few had high hopes a decade ago are capable of demanding, and achieving, democratic self-governance. This is a backdrop of optimism to the otherwise depressing scene last weekend of Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in Minsk, the Belarusian capital. Police indiscriminately clubbed students, women and pensioners, locking up hundreds, including the former Polish ambassador to Belarus, at least one opposition leader, several international aid workers and some foreign journalists.

The good news is that the virus of democracy, especially in post-communist Europe, has a proven track record of spreading and solidifying. It says something powerful that the Western country taking the lead role in pressuring Lukashenko is Poland -- and that the beleaguered protesters are consciously drawing on a tradition that runs from Solidarity to Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 to the various “color” revolutions belatedly percolating along Russia’s borders. The protesters’ bravery deserves our applause and support, and the 10 million other residents of Belarus deserve the same opportunities finally being embraced in neighboring Ukraine.