Elections Now May Not Be the Safeguard Ukrainian Democracy Needs

A call by Ukraine's former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov for new national elections — the first since 2019 — has revived the debate about whether a legitimate wartime vote is possible.

Under normal circumstances, parliamentary elections would have been held in October 2023 and presidential elections in March 2024. The circumstances are not normal.

The conditions

Almost a fifth of Ukraine is occupied by Russian troops. Millions of people are displaced, inside the country and beyond it. Citizens across the territory are subject to daily missile and drone attacks.

Each of those facts creates a specific electoral problem rather than a general difficulty.

People in occupied territory cannot vote, which disenfranchises a substantial population disproportionately concentrated in particular regions with particular political histories. Displaced people are registered in places they no longer live. Voting requires assembling large numbers of people at publicised locations on a known date, in a country where such gatherings are targeted.

The case for holding one anyway

Fedorov's argument is not frivolous, and it should be stated at its strongest.

A government operating without a fresh mandate for years accumulates a legitimacy deficit that compounds. Emergency powers become normal. Opposition has no route to contest decisions. And a wartime administration that never faces voters can begin to treat the emergency as the justification for its own continuation — which is the mechanism by which democracies have historically failed.

There is also an external dimension. Ukraine's partners are funding a war on behalf of a democratic government, and adversaries make use of every year that passes without a vote.

The case against

An election held under these conditions carries risks that a delayed one does not.

A result produced with a fifth of the electorate excluded, millions voting from abroad or from displacement, and campaigning restricted by security would be contestable — by domestic losers, by Russia, and by anyone with an interest in describing the outcome as illegitimate. A vote intended to settle the legitimacy question could easily unsettle it further.

There is a harder point beneath that. Elections are not merely a procedure; they require a period in which parties can campaign freely, media can report, and voters can deliberate. Compressing that into a country under bombardment produces the form of an election without its substance — and the form alone confers no legitimacy on anyone who examines it.

What actually protects democracy meanwhile

The framing of the debate — elections or nothing — is the part worth resisting.

Democratic accountability during a suspension of elections runs through other institutions: a parliament that continues to sit and vote, courts that function independently, media that can criticise the government, and anti-corruption bodies with real powers. Each of those is testable now, and each has come under pressure in Ukraine over the past two years.

That is where the argument should concentrate. A country cannot hold a credible election in current conditions; it can maintain the institutions that will make one credible when conditions allow — and the state of those institutions is a better measure of Ukrainian democracy today than the date of the next ballot.

The precedent nobody cites

Britain suspended general elections for the duration of the Second World War, extending a parliament elected in 1935 until 1945.

That is not a defence of any particular Ukrainian decision, and the differences are substantial — Britain was not partly occupied, and its electorate was not scattered across a continent. But it is a reminder that mature democracies have judged, under existential threat, that suspension was the lesser risk.

The test of whether they were right came afterwards, in whether the vote actually happened once the emergency ended. That is the standard by which Ukraine will eventually be judged, and it is not one that can be applied yet.