No Place To Go But The Polls

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine’s democratic coalition collapsed with a dull thud when parliament’s speaker, Arseniy Yatseniuk, announced on the morning of 16 September that talks to revive the coalition had failed.

Non-stop bickering between the 'Orange' team's Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yushchenko has created a political mess that is not helping Ukraine's image abroad or its aspirations to join the European Union and NATO.
The collapse was initiated on 4 September, when President Viktor Yushchenko’s parliamentary faction, Our Ukraine, announced its withdrawal from a coalition with BYuT, the bloc headed by his onetime Orange Revolution ally, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. A 10-day grace period, foreseen by parliamentary rules of procedure, yielded no noticeable movement and no chances of reviving the Our Ukraine-BYuT parliamentary majority.

The expected hand-wringing, within and outside of Ukraine, has followed. Ukraine’s chances of entering the European Union and NATO have been downgraded, its future as a developing democratic nation placed in doubt. But the collapse of the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko coalition was long overdue and was no more than a recognition of the reality on the ground.

The coalition, formed with a bare majority of 50-percent-plus-two-seats in parliament, has largely been a sham since its inception. Yulia Tymoshenko was appointed prime minister last December following early elections in September. From day one of her tenure, however, Yushchenko worked hard at undermining her.

NON-STOP BICKERING

As early as January, the president introduced a bill seeking to limit the powers of the cabinet headed by Tymoshenko.

One of Tymoshenko’s first acts as prime minister was to seek to revoke the license to supply natural gas granted to UkrGazEnergo, owned 50-50 by Ukraine’s state energy giant, Naftohaz, and the shadowy intermediary company RosUkrEnergo. Yushchenko conducted separate talks with Russia’s leaders, who back RosUkrEnergo, and even expressed tacit support for Russia’s position. Tymoshenko responded by trying to liquidate UkrGazEnergo, but this initiative has bogged down in the courts.

Later, in the spring, Tymoshenko repealed a license granted to the U.S. company Vanco to explore for fossil fuel deposits off Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and ignored Yushchenko’s demands that the license be reinstated.

Also early on, Tymoshenko attempted to push through an ambitious privatization program, including of Ukraine’s “last-mile” telephone line monopolist, Ukrtelecom, a major chemical plant and distributor in Odessa, and 24 other state-owned companies.

These initiatives were not greeted with enthusiasm in the president’s camp, to put it mildly. Yushchenko doubtless calculated that his rival would use the proceeds from her privatization program to pay back some of their lost Soviet-era savings to Ukrainian citizens and pursue other populist measures, thereby raising her own popularity. Yushchenko issued decrees halting the privatization of the Odessa Port Factory and several other enterprises. Tymoshenko responded by publicly calling Yushchenko’s decrees “empty” and saying she would go ahead with the planned privatizations regardless.

This tit-for-tat pattern then continued. Tymoshenko’s government adopted a decision to conduct public auctions of land, and Yushchenko rescinded it. Tymoshenko demanded the resignation of General Prosecutor Oleksandr Medvedko, and Yushchenko left him in place. Tymoshenko directed the head of Ukraine’s state savings bank, Oshchadbank, to manage the Soviet-era savings repayments, after which Yushchenko demanded his resignation.

Small wonder that in early February the journalist Viktor Chyvokunia wrote an article titled “Return of the Cold War Between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko.”

On the issue of privatizations, the confrontation came to a dramatic head in May. Tymoshenko needed to change the director of the State Property Fund, the Socialist Valentyna Semeniuk, who is opposed to privatization on principle. Tymoshenko’s candidate was Andriy Portnov, a lawyer associated with the Privat Group headed by oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and former President Leonid Kuchma’s chief-of-staff, Viktor Medvedchuk. Tymoshenko and Yushchenko then traded decisions and decrees, with the former appointing Portnov and the latter rescinding these decisions, until Tymoshenko established a parallel property fund in the building housing the cabinet itself. Mail to the fund was diverted here, Portnov produced a second official seal of the fund and the State Treasury was instructed to take orders only from Portnov. But Yushchenko responded forcefully by getting Medvedko to open criminal cases against officials adhering to Tymoshenko’s decisions, including against Portnov, and Tymoshenko’s group was forced to back down.

DAMN THE TORPEDOES

Tymoshenko has not been blameless herself, and her forceful style has provided fodder for the salvoes she has endured from the presidential camp. Although in mid-January Standard & Poor’s warned against Tymoshenko’s plan to return to Ukrainians part of their personal savings lost during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tymoshenko forged ahead anyway. The result was a spike in inflation of 30 percent in April.

Many of Yushchenko’s actions vis-à-vis Tymoshenko consisted of a reaction to her heavy-handed methods of governing. Tymoshenko is an adherent of the practice of ruchne upravlinia, or “hands-on governing,” whereby the prime minister herself attempts to run individual government ministries or agencies, at times in contravention of the law.

On 23 January, for instance, Tymoshenko’s government adopted a decision allowing government agencies to ignore court decisions that were made “consciously illegally.” She then proposed a bill, opposed by Yushchenko, that would have liquidated higher specialized courts. In July, Tymoshenko instructed the head of Ukraine’s energy transportation company, Ukrtransnafta, not to sign any documents and even not to participate in any meetings or consultations regarding the transportation of oil via the Odessa-Brody pipeline. Tymoshenko’s diktat was not surprisingly seen as subverting a presidential decree adopted in May that requires the pipeline to begin pumping oil to Europe.

During the course of their drawn-out conflict, Yushchenko left most of the criticism of Tymoshenko to his chief of staff, Viktor Baloha. During the past year, Baloha has publicly accused Tymoshenko of possessing a Napoleonic complex and of hypocrisy, and in August Baloha even accused Tymoshenko of cooperating with Islamic extremists and of plotting his murder.

Tymoshenko, for her part, consistently refused to be drawn into an exchange of public acrimony with Baloha, whom she views as a minor functionary. This summer, a BYuT member of parliament told this reporter privately that Tymoshenko had for months been quelling a rising tide of protest within her party, insisting on not publicly replying to accusations from Yushchenko’s camp. Tymoshenko had counted on taking the high road and waited to respond forcefully, apparently adopting Teddy Roosevelt’s maxim of “speaking softly, but carrying a big stick.”

TREASON AND INSANITY

But even Tymoshenko’s patience wore out after Yushchenko accused her of betraying her country. On 18 August Andriy Kyslynsky, deputy chairman of the presidential secretariat and Baloha’s direct subordinate, declared that Tymoshenko was cooperating with the Russian leadership by not declaring her support for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in the South Ossetian conflict. In return, Kyslynsky claimed, Russian money and the government itself were preparing to support Tymoshenko in a bid for the presidency. The presidential secretariat asked the Secret Service to examine whether the prime minister had acted “to damage the country’s national interests.”

The brief, sharp war in August between Georgia and Russia served as a convenient fulcrum for Yushchenko in mobilizing support against Tymoshenko. Because the prime minister was noticeably reluctant in supporting Saakashvili, with whom Tymoshenko had hit it off when she visited Tbilisi in June 2005 during her earlier stint as premier, some deputies from Our Ukraine spoke openly of a “Kremlin plot” to “destroy Ukraine’s statehood,” assisted by BYuT. Such attitudes came to the fore when Our Ukraine’s political council voted on 4 September to dissolve their coalition with the Tymoshenko Bloc and accused BYuT of “creating a new, pro-Kremlin majority” in parliament, according to a party statement.

On 20 September Yushchenko himself said Tymoshenko’s actions were “aimed at destabilizing the situation” and called them “treason.”

Tymoshenko responded, “I believe that [Yushchenko’s accusation] is already insanity.”

Given the tone, it is hardly surprising that representatives of both sides have admitted they are not even conducting any talks on a new coalition.

In the meantime, his penchant for hyperbole is not winning Yushchenko any points. His abysmal poll ratings, consistently in the single digits, have not budged noticeably after he expressed support for Saakashvili and vilified Tymoshenko.

NO COALITIONS LEFT

Therein lies the crux of the matter. Yushchenko faces re-election in a year’s time with practically no chance of winning. He would like to try for a repeat of 2004, when he faced Viktor Yanukovych, head of the Party of Regions, and won, thanks to the Orange Revolution. But Yushchenko is unlikely to even make it into a second round, given that Tymoshenko is several times more popular than he. Thus Yushchenko has, through Baloha, done practically everything possible to stymie Tymoshenko in her tenure as prime minister, in order to try and lower her poll ratings.

Now that the differences between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko have become irreconcilable, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions is looking to make it back into government. Yanukovych headed a government with Yushchenko as president from August 2006 to December 2007. Their differences turned out to be irreconcilable as well, and Yushchenko was forced to call early elections by decree.

The only remaining workable combination of parliamentary factions that has not been tried is that of BYuT and the Party of Regions. These two forces have already cooperated in the past. On 2 September the two blocs voted together to pass changes to the laws on the cabinet, the General Prosecutor’s Office, and the Secret Service. The point of the amendments passed was to decrease the president’s powers. In response, Yushchenko called the voting a “constitutional coup-d’état.”

Tymoshenko and Yanukovych have acknowledged they are in coalition talks. But the problem facing them is acute. Tymoshenko’s entire raison-d’etre in government is to head it. Yanukovych, for his part, yearning to erase his defeat in 2004, cannot do a climb-down and forgo the premiership with presidential elections only a year away.

If a new coalition is not created within a month after the previous coalition’s dissolution, by 4 October, Yushchenko will have the authority, though not the obligation, to call new, early parliamentary elections. There are good reasons for him to do so. In the past, Our Ukraine has not proven reliable in doing what Baloha wants and has at times sided with BYuT. In March, Baloha helped found a new political party, Single Center, as an additional pillar of support for Yushchenko. But Single Center’s real purpose is to provide Baloha with his own political organization. Baloha is rumored to harbor his own prime-ministerial ambitions.

In the meantime, the Party of Regions and the Tymoshenko Bloc say they have begun preparations for elections. Ukraine looks set to head for the polls once again, for the third time in as many years. The political forces involved seem determined to undergo repeat elections, until they “get it right.”

Source: Transitions Online