Beautiful But Tough: Yulia Tymoshenko Attacks The Tycoons

KIEV, Ukraine -- Her Luis Vuitton suits fit to a tee, her toilette is exquisite, she tears about the country in a convoy of limousines, and she campaigns as a defender of the poor and downtrodden.

The beautiful but tough Yulia Tymoshenko
Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine's top opposition politician and by all accounts the country's best-dressed and most politically-powerful woman, is out to get the rich and influential. She is taking no prisoners.

Tymoshenko, 46, is criss-crossing the land in, arguably, the former Soviet republic's first-ever nationwide whistle-stop election campaign. Wearing pure white down to her designer shoes and pearl earrings, she says she is on nothing less than a crusade against corruption - a theme with considerable resonance in Ukraine, by many accounts Europe's most corrupt nation.

'Yulia,' as most Ukrainians call petite Tymoshenko, has spent the last 45 days on the campaign trail, mostly on the road, talking to voters, speaking at rallies, and sleeping at best five hours a day.

'I have travelled the country from end to end, and people are getting tired of getting lied to over and over again,' Tymoshenko told Fakty newspaper. 'And that is going to bring us support, far more than any one expects.'

Certainly her rallies are drawing them in. Since July the Tymoshenko campaign cavalcade has rolled into hundreds of town and city squares, and sometimes the crowds number in the tens of thousands.

Tymoshenko's ability to draw in listeners is unmatched by any other Ukrainian politician, who in any case as a group prefer buying TV ads and smear news reports, over active campaigning.

The Tymoshenko stump speech is, by the standards of modern electioneering, surprisingly simple. There is a stage with red-and-white bunting, a medium-power public address system, and booths with campaign workers handing out brochures.

During the warm-up party functionaries appeal to the crowd for volunteers and contributions, and - critically as Ukraine is a country where relatives count - remind listeners that whatever they heard today, please, please tell a family member.

Tymoshenko appears, as always her coiffure in a traditional, museum-perfect Ukrainian peasant braid. Her oratory perhaps mesmerises some, but mostly, Tymoshenko holds her listeners by saying out loud, what a substantial majority of Ukrainians think about their politicians and their government.

Often, she rubbishes conventional wisdom on Ukraine in the process. Throughout, she relentlessly hammers her thesis: Corrupt government must end.

The division of Ukraine into two supposedly incompatible ethnic halves, Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking, get this treatment:

'Ukraine is not a country divided into Russians and Ukrainians, that is an artificial divide invented to frighten people ... Ukraine is divided into 47 million honest people, and a few hundred clans out to steal from the honest people.'

Her intention to become the next Prime Minister, touted by her opponents as unseemly ambition for a woman, received this broadside, recalling jail time stemming from 2001 tax evasion charges, which were subsequently dropped:

'If I had set myself the goal of being Prime Minister, I would have had that job years ago, and held it still. The thing is, the business clans gave me a choice, either stop making their life difficult, or go to prison. I went to prison, but at least my integrity stayed intact.'

The crowds have been friendly, supportive, and almost always either unwilling or too polite to bring up unpleasant issues like Tymoshenko's notoriously failed attempts to freeze petrol and food prices while she was Prime Minister in 2000, her fortune made in government natural gas imports during the 1990s, or the two dozen or so very wealthy businessmen on her own party list.

'We are all tired of the rich clans using government to steal from us, and making us poor,' her speeches often conclude. 'It needs to stop, and with your help we can stop it together. Glory to Ukraine!'

In town after town, village after village, that sentence has received standing ovations.

Ukrainian pollsters are a bit sceptical, usually predicting Tymoshenko's eponymous political party Block of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT) stands to gather in 25 to 30 per cent of the popular vote, in a clear second place to the currently ruling Regions Ukraine party, currently on track to take between 32 and 40 per cent of the vote.

'Do not underestimate the Ukrainian people,' Tymoshenko countered in a recent interview. 'They have had enough.'

Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur