Reflections on Ukraine’s sorry politics…
Kurt Bassuener September 23rd, 2008
Iryna Chupryna wrote an insightful analysis of the political situation on Ukraine as an issue of DPC Analyst, posted today. The collapse of the “Orange” coalition of President Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko seems destined to lead to new parliamentary elections - the third in three years, as Iryna noted. Ukrainian voters, especially those who had high hopes from the victory of December 2004, are beginning to despair; many are tuning out of politics altogether. Given the fact that the election results will probably not deliver a fundamental change to political order, but merely reshuffle the existing deck, it is easy to sympathize with their frustration. Only Ukrainians, primarily in the east and south of the country, who voted for the Party of Regions, headed by Viktor Yanukovych, do not feel disappointed or let down by their leaders, and they form the largest single bloc. Given the fact that Yanukovych not only conspired with President Kuchma and his chief of staff Viktor Medvedchuk (with considerable assistance from Vladimir Putin and now-President Dmitri Medvedev) to steal the 2004 election, this is a nearly incomprehensible result. But it is nonetheless true. What was won in the cold streets of Kyiv’s Maidan in November and December seems to have been mortally wounded through infighting, ego battles, and and unwillingness to put the public interest first.
No one side in the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko conflict is solely guilty. My own view is to have more disappointment in Yushchenko, since I expected better from him, while Yulia Tymoshenko’s brand of populism proved to be a double-edged sword, but a known one throughout. The pairing was absolutely essential during the presidential campaign after Yushchenko was poisoned, with Tymoshenko taking on the heavy travel schedule that the Yushchenko campaign planned to circumvent the media blockade against it until Yushchenko could return. Tymoshenko was also very insistent on the monitoring the vote count. She was a crowd-pleaser on the Maidan, and judging from the reception on New Year’s 2005 (where Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who once studied in Kyiv and speaks fluent Ukrainian, also spoke) at the Maidan, the bigger star.
The coalition was difficult from the start, given so many egos and interests to balance. Even from Spring 2005, it appeared that Yushchenko didn’t have a strong enough grip on his administration and government. And it went downhill from there.
What didn’t happen, but must if Ukraine is to prosper and progress toward integration with the EU (a door which still remains closed for the moment, unfortunately - the EU has enormous capacity to use conditions for membership to spur the necessary reforms to Ukraine’s still sclerotic governance and administration) is some effort to bridge the east-west divide in Ukrainian politics. This divide began to be ameliorated during Kuchma’s presidency, and the great perversity of his attempt to retain power vicariously was that he was willing to scuttle his greatest achievment as president for a decade - an otherwise increasingly corrupt and sordid reign. Nonetheless, due to the combined factors of incoherence in the ruling coalition, the fact that the Party of Regions is still led by the polarizing Viktor Yanukovych, an increasingly polarized international political situation and a lack of EU strategy toward Ukraine, the country remains split essentially along the lines of the 2004 election.
There was talk when I was in Ukraine a year ago, before parliamentary elections, that sub rosa efforts were ongoing to hive off the main body of the Party of Regions under Donetsk-based tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, and then forging a Our Ukraine coalition with this party, leaving a rump PoR and the Tymoshenko Bloc out of power. Odd as it sounds, many “Orange” veterans were in favor of such a coalition, for only an easterner could sell NATO membership the the south and east, but generally for the potential to knit the country back together behind a common agenda to pursue EU membership.
It remains to be seen what that United Center party will accomplish, but it is hard to see a way out of the current impasse without new players and new ideas.
