Analysts: Tymoshenko Govt In For Hard Year

KIEV, Ukraine -- Two senior Ukrainian analysts have forecast a hard year for Ukraine's new government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and one of them has forecast her Cabinet will be out of office before the end of 2008.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko
"The main reason why I'm speaking of it as a provisional government are sentiments that exist in the government itself today," Valery Chaly, deputy director of the Oleksandr Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies, told Interfax.

The director of the Sofia social studies center, Andriy Yermolayev, said: "Tymoshenko is entering 2008 as an obvious winner, she has very good starting positions and a well-built personal political team. The fact that the [liberal parliamentary] coalition is weak and the government is controversial will not stop her from building up her political resources and popularity. Possibly it will be her highest point. Whether it will be possible to rise higher than that is difficult to tell."

"It is doubtless that populist social decisions will strengthen her popularity, but the problem is that, to be popular, a political leader needs to be the leader of elite objectives and plans because it is on the elites and their plans that the stable functioning of the economy and political compromise depend on. Her language, her methods reflect the position of a leader of the masses, but this is not enough to govern a country. Who will be able to become an alternative to her, and whether any alternative is possible, is one of the riddles of 2008," Yermolayev said.

"There will be no new coalitions in 2008," he said.

"It is another story that the current coalition will most likely be a nominal entity rather than one doing any practical work," Yermolayev said.

Internal controversies will prevent the coalition from operating as a stable decision-making center, and the role of such a center will go over to the government, he argued.

Yermolayev also predicted that the opposition would become more powerful.

"The Regions [Party of Regions] may become the first disciplined opposition group that would not break control panels [at power plants] but will formulate serious economic and political alternatives to the government's policies. Voters are going to witness an interesting political war over methods, solutions, interpretations of events," he said

Source: Interfax