By Charles G. Hawley

American elections are causing worldwide anxiety, but the numbers from Ukraine's presidential elections are already coming in -- lots of them and many conflicting. The results coming out of this fledgling democracy are less the stuff of dry political discourse than late night comedy. Provisional (government) results from Sunday's election show Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych leading by a razor thin margin (40.12 percent) over his challenger Viktor Yushchenko (39.15 percent). Other independently conducted exit polls show Yushchenko leading with 46 percent to 37 percent. Yushchenko's campaign, for its part, is claiming 49.9 percent of the vote.

Regardless of how the numbers get scrambled, one thing is clear: nobody got the 50 percent needed for outright victory, which means the two are headed for a runoff on Nov.21. Still, why was there so much confusion?

"It looks like the election authorities are ready to falsify and to manipulate the elections," Juri Durkot, a Ukrainian journalist who reports from Ukraine for a number of European newspapers, told SPIEGEL INTERNATIONAL just before the vote. "The big question is how much one needs to falsify. If you only need to falsify 3-5 percent then it is clear that it will take place." Falsifying small amounts, he explained, is fairly easy to get away with.

Durkot isn't the only one questioning election practices in Ukraine. On Monday, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who will also be observing Tuesday's vote in the United States, blasted Ukrainian democracy. "We have to conclude that this election did not meet a considerable number of OSCE, Council of Europe, and other European standards for democratic elections," Bruce George, coordinator of the observers in Ukraine, said on Monday.

A return to the autocratic state?

There were, clearly, numerous irregularities in the election, and the OSCE reported all of them it could find. For instance, government security forces openly harrassed television, newspapers and online media outlets that were critical of the government. Police and security goons repeatedly broke up campaign rallies for Yushchenko. And, in the oddest case -- so frightening it is almost farcical -- Yuschenko suffered what most believe was a political poisoning. He got so sick that he could not stop vomitting and had to be rushed to Austria for emergency medical treatment. Doctors there said he almost died. The illness left him haggard and weak and transformed his otherwise strong face into a blotchy, puffed-up mess for the rest of the campaign.

With President Vladimir Putin in Russia and President Alexander Lukaschenko in Belorussia both having recently solidified their own strangle-holds on power -- Putin through presidential decree, Lukaschenko through "democratic elections" -- it would be easy enough just to write off Ukraine as yet another example of a post-Soviet state returning to an autocratic tradition.

Despite the low-budget election theater, it's still too early to slap a totalitarian label on Ukraine. There are important issues at stake in the election and, even considering the manipulations, the opposition is strong. The level of political dialogue might be low, but the country is, say observers like Durkot, genuinely split about what direction it wants to go: whether to buddy up to traditional ally Russia, or whether to continue on the bumpy path toward Europe.

The election campaign has been dominated by the conduct of the campaign itself ... rather than policy issues," says Marius Vahl of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. "Nevertheless, integration with Russia or with Europe and the West has become an important underlying theme in the debate between the two principal contenders."

A candidate for Russia and another for Europe

Prime Minister Yanukovych is seen as the candidate looking for economic union with Russia, Belorussia, and Kazakhstan -- the so-called Single Economic Space (SES). He is the clear choice of the authoritarian current president Leonid Kuchma and received massive funding (to the tune of $300 million) and stumping from Putin. In a post-Soviet reflex, Russia continues to view Ukraine as a buffer state to the south.

His challenger Yushchenko is seen as the candidate of Europe. His campaign was assisted by European consultants and he has constantly beaten the drum of European integration and European Union membership for Ukraine (even if the EU has not yet stamped Ukraine as a potential member -- a reluctance that hasn't helped Yushchenko in his campaign). He is generally seen as less corrupt and one who plays by the rules. He would likely put an immediate stop to the oppressive controls on the independent media that currently characterize Ukraine.

Despite widespread attempts by the current government under Kuchma to control the media and to limit opposition face-time on television, Yushchenko's good showing on Sunday seems to indicate that Ukrainians, over half of whom support the idea of EU membership, see through their government's heavy-handed attempts to silence the opposition. Voters are also beginning to see through ethnic politicking. Despite western newspaper reports that candidate support is neatly divided between the Russian-speaking east (Yanukovych) and the Ukrainian-speaking west (Yushchenko), Wilfried Jilge, an expert on Ukraine at the Institute of History and Culture of East Central Europe in Leipzig, says that widespread opposition support in some traditionally Russian-speaking areas of Central and Northern Ukraine makes that view less compelling.

"Since 2001 there have been obvious authoritarian tendencies, especially in the power structures of the office of the president," Jilge told SPIEGEL INTERNATIONAL. "This has led to a number of clear disadvantages for the opposition in the current campaign. On the other hand, though ... there is a strong, westward looking opposition that, despite huge government manipulation of Ukraine's population, has strong support and has been able to torpedo a complete manipulation of election results."

Politically, that appears to be true. But practically, even with that strong opposition, it isn't clear whether Yushchenko would be able or even willing to change all that ails Ukraine. Economic power and political power in Ukraine are virtually synonymous. Rich oligarchs are unwilling to release their grip on the power they have built up since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is this entrenched economic corruption that confronts any attempts at reform and that has steered state security services to become ever-more heavy-handed in their dealings with opposition voices.

"It is like the reflexes of an animal - like an octopus," says Boris Mostrovia, former editor of an online magazine in Ukraine which was driven out of business by the state security apparatus. The state "doesn't have much brain, but its energy is devoted solely to trying to catch the opposition and eat them. This octopus stretches out in all directions and it has already eaten the print media and industry. The opposition is next."

The country is now facing three more weeks of direct head-to-head campaigning between the two candidates. Both the EU and the OSCE have urged Ukraine to ensure the fairness of the run-off election on Nov. 21. That likely won't happen; the theater of irregularities will move to the next act and the government will likely continue trying to steer its hand-picked candidate into office.