“STABILITY and well-being.” That is the simple slogan with which Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions want to win a general election on October 28th. Mr Yanukovych can claim some achievements, in particular the Euro 2012 football championship this summer, which Ukraine successfully co-hosted with Poland. But many of the country’s voters remain dispirited. More than half of those surveyed say the country is heading “in the wrong direction”. Even more say they do not expect free and fair elections.

Yet it is exactly this sense of defeatism and alienation that may let the Party of Regions, along with its parliamentary allies, extend its hold over the Rada (parliament), if not get a constitution-changing two-thirds majority. In theory, Mr Yanukovych could then pull his country closer to Europe. But all indications suggest that, under him, Ukraine is sinking deeper into cronyism and authoritarianism.

The Party of Regions will benefit from a new electoral code, passed in 2011. Half of the Rada’s 450 seats will now come from first-past-the-post contests, which greatly favours the ruling party. For this, the opposition has itself partly to blame: it voted to approve the new rules, revealing both its fecklessness and disorganisation.

Favourable media attention, the use of payroll votes and phoney candidates and parties will also boost Mr Yanukovych’s chances. His party could win an election that is manipulated but seems superficially correct. No matter what, the fact that the opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, and her ally, Yuriy Lutsenko, are imprisoned and were barred from the ballot means “there will be an asterisk” after the election, says a Western diplomat.

Although Ms Tymoshenko is viewed with more scepticism than trust by much of the electorate, she is a skilled campaigner with a knack for political manoeuvring. Hryhoriy Nemyria of Ms Tymoshenko’s coalition says her absence from the campaign has caused “moral and operational damage”. This explains why Mr Yanukovych was so set, to the point of paranoia, on seeing her behind bars.

An energising moment in an otherwise uninspired campaign has been the emergence of Vitali Klitschko, a world champion boxer, and his Udar (“Punch”) party. Mr Klitschko criticises Mr Yanukovych, but has kept outside the united opposition. Some already think Mr Klitschko could challenge Mr Yanukovych in the next presidential election, in 2015. He has the potential to appeal to voters in the country’s south and east, who may have grown tired of Mr Yanukovych but are not willing to support candidates from Ms Tymoshenko’s lot. But much depends on the patience and skills of Mr Klitschko, so far untested in the political ring.

Most Ukrainians still want to move closer to the EU but it is unclear if Ukraine’s association agreement, which would boost trade, can be resuscitated. Talks broke down after Ms Tymoshenko’s prosecution. Mr Yanukovych thinks he can simply wait for the issue to be forgotten. A European diplomat says his Ukrainian counterparts seem to think, “We are important enough to get it the way we want.” But they underestimate Europe’s frustration and waning interest, just as they underestimated the backlash to the jailing of Ms Tymoshenko.

Russia, by contrast, is keen to lure Ukraine into its customs union, which could not get off the ground without its participation. But for all the talk of his being pro-Russian, Mr Yanukovych desperately wants to avoid becoming “just another governor of Putin’s,” says Vladimir Fesenko of the Penta Centre, a local think-tank.

Mr Yanukovych does admire Vladimir Putin’s “vertical power”. Changes to the judiciary have brought the courts largely under Mr Yanukovych’s control, and a ruling by the constitutional court in 2010 restored many of the presidency’s powers. Corporate raids have seen many businesses’ interests transferred to loyalists of the Party of Regions. The fortunes of Mr Yanukovych’s two sons and their friends—a group known as “the family”—have risen markedly, creating a new business and political elite dependent on Mr Yanukovych.

But Ukraine is not Russia, and Mr Yanukovych is not Mr Putin. The country’s regional and political diversity leads to a kind of “pluralism by default”, says Olexiy Haran of the Kyiv Mohyla University. Mr Yanukovych and the country’s oligarchs find themselves in a complicated embrace: the president is as much beholden to the oligarchs as he lords over their fates. The country’s media networks, for example, are controlled by various oligarchic groups, not by Mr Yanukovych or his sons.

Meanwhile, influential oligarchs who have long backed Mr Yanukovych and the Party of Regions are wary of “the family” and are displeased by Ukraine’s alienation from Europe. Some members of the ruling party are pushing for reform. Serhiy Tihipko, the deputy prime minister, blames a “lack of political will” for the limited progress. Among many other things, Ukraine will have to raise gas prices and allow its currency to depreciate if it wants to gain the support of the International Monetary Fund that it desperately needs.

In the end, not much may change after the election. Disillusionment after the Orange revolution of 2004-5 created the ideal environment for Mr Yanukovych to consolidate power—and create what Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, calls a “predatory dictatorship”. Mr Yanukovych would have found this much harder had he, and not the Orange camp’s Viktor Yushchenko, taken the presidency in 2004. In other words, it may have been Mr Yanukovych’s good fortune to lose then, only to come back stronger now.