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05.04.07
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A Spring Of Discontent
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By Paul Abelsky
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KIEV. Signs pointing to a crisis in Ukrainian politics were gathering force all of last week, but President Viktor Yushchenko’s decision late on Monday night to disband the Verkhovna Rada and call for new parliamentary elections still stunned political circles both inside Ukraine and beyond. After months of seeing his presidential powers slip away, and faced with dwindling parliamentary support as more deputies gravitated toward the coalition based around the Party of the Regions headed by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, Yushchenko seized the initiative in Ukrainian politics.
Events developed at breakneck speed starting late on Monday whenYushchenko issued a decree calling for new elections, a decision he confirmed as final and irreversible following a nearly five-hour meeting on Tuesday with Yanukovich. The parliament’s ruling majority refused to submit, meeting all night on Monday and throughout Tuesday. Lawmakers from the majority appealed to the Constitutional Court to adjudicate the matter within five days, calling the president’s actions a breach of the constitutional order. They also forbade the government and the National Bank to bankroll the elections, and nominated new members to the Central Electoral Committee. Both sides exchanged accusations of usurping power, and the president contested each of the parliament’s moves to challenge his authority.
If the parliamentary dissolution survives the challenges in the courts of public and legal opinion and the elections go ahead as scheduled in May, current polls indicate the president’s Our Ukraine party will emerge as an even weaker political force, ceding ground to the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko and the Party of the Regions. But with his political standing and legacy at stake, a broader calculus dictated Yushchenko’s staunch measures.
Last week began with the most notable defection yet from Yushchenko’s orbit. The parliament’s so-called Anti-Crisis Coalition, an alliance that coalesced around the Party of the Regions with Communist and Socialist parties in the supporting cast, has been recruiting malcontent members of other factions in a bid to string together a constitutional majority able to override presidential vetoes. Anatoly Kinakh, the president’s former national security adviser, became one of 11 Rada deputies to join the ruling parliamentary group, which has since renamed itself the “Coalition of National Unity.” In exchange for his defection, Kinakh obtained the post of minister of the economy.
“The gains of the parliamentary majority came at the expense of those who took the Orange side during the revolution,” said Iskander Khisamov, chief editor of Expert Ukraina magazine in Kiev. “The moves were driven more by pragmatism and economic concerns, chipping away at the ideological extremes of both sides and forging something close to what they call themselves, a coalition of national unity.”
The indomitable Yulia Tymoshenko, the heroine of the 2004 Orange Revolution and prime minister in Yushchenko’s government for nine months the following year, has been clamoring for the president to take measures against renegade politicians aiming to remake the Rada’s internal composition. Since Ukraine’s Constitutional Court has been held back by continuing personnel problems and therefore unable to pass judgment on the legality of the parliamentary desertions, the opposition’s only recourse was an appeal to Yushchenko’s ability to disband the legislature as a stopgap measure. With the president issuing portentous statements all week, pronouncing himself at one point to be “morally ready” to dissolve the parliament, a set of maneuvers prepared the ground for the decisive action on Monday night.
After holding a controversial meeting with the justices of the Constitutional Court in the middle of the week, the president attended his party’s congress on Saturday where his close ally, Vyacheslav Kirilenko, was elected Our Ukraine’s titular chief. For his part, Kirilenko immediately pledged public loyalty to the president. The same day, rowdy demonstrations returned to the streets of Kiev. While Yanukovich and his supporters held court at European Square at a rally attended by tens of thousands, the opposition gathered at Independence Square, the center of the protests that brought them to power in the Orange Revolution. Flanked by Kirilenko and Yury Lutsenko, Yushchenko’s former minister of the interior and leader of People’s Self-Defense party, Tymoshenko delivered unyielding statements both to the president and to the parliamentary majority, whose actions she characterized as unconstitutional.
This time, however, the protests were seen as anticlimactic, although the evenly matched forces demonstrated that Yanukovich’s party has become much more adept at staging political spectacles to project its message to the public. More importantly, the widespread frustration with the bickering and failings that followed the Orange Revolution have deprived Ukraine’s street politics of the vigor it possessed in 2004. Ideological clashes have increasingly been diverted into the forum of the country’s fractious political establishment.
“Ukraine was able to turn away from the brink of the civil war and relocate the conflict inside the cabinets, delegating to Yanukovich, Yushchenko and others the right to debate each other directly and not on the streets,” Khisamov said. “This has taken the edge off a mounting nationwide split. As we have seen, the parliamentary coalition absorbed members not just from the southeast, but also deputies from the more nationalist-minded areas in the west, negating the sharp regional contradictions.”
The continuing showdown between the legislative and executive branches of power, however, has re-exposed the countrywide rifts that erupted during the Orange Revolution and were never properly healed. “The politicians who took power and made the most of the nation’s divide didn’t fully appreciate the genuine problems that existed between parts of the country,” said Anatoly Romanyuk, political scientist at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. “They may have exploited these issues unconsciously, but they did next to nothing to address them in the years that followed. Starting in 2006, the divisions reappeared, and what we are seeing now once again resembles the identity politics of the earlier struggle.”
Regional officials chimed in with their own positions on the crisis. With the exception of the leaders of Sevastopol, Kiev and the Crimea, all regional heads put out declarations in support of the president. Most regional parliaments, however, apart from Lviv, spoke out against the early elections. The Defense minister and the acting director of Ukraine’s security service urged the prime minister to comply with presidential orders. Vasily Tsushko, the interior minister allied with Yanukovich, appealed to all sides to contest the issues in court, avoiding an outright confrontation. Concerned statements followed from the European Commission and other international institutions, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterating Russia’s willingness to help mediate the dispute.
Experts disagree on the likely course of the widening political crisis. Some observers do not discount the possibility that the more radical offshoot of the opposition would like to push ahead both with parliamentary and presidential elections, remaking the political landscape beyond what Yushchenko may envision. The present standoff may yet prove a blustery exercise in brinkmanship, with cooler heads among the financiers and business leaders underwriting the different parties getting behind a new power-sharing compromise with Yushchenko. The president’s impeachment remains a far-fetched option, advocated mostly by Speaker of the Rada Alexander Moroz’s Socialist party, which stands to lose the most in the coming elections. Similarly, split loyalties in the security apparatus and regional elites mitigate the danger of outright clashes. Only days into the showdown, most parties are already revving up their electoral campaigns.
With both sides appealing to the constitutionality of their actions, the most constructive option is to channel the conflict through the Constitutional Court, which played a key role in settling the impasse following the fraudulent second round of the presidential vote in 2004. Although inevitable parallels arise with the events in Russia in 1993, when President Boris Yeltsin battled the rebellious parliament in an armed confrontation, the Ukrainian scenario seems a direct consequence of the issues that remain unresolved from 2004. It may be worthwhile to revisit the proposed changes to the presidency and take up once again the issue of the circumscribed powers of the head of state.
The continuing seesaw struggle between the parliament and the president has turned off the already disenchanted electorate, and the situation today offers another chance to strike a lasting solution. At stake is nothing less than Ukraine’s standing as a sound political partner and viable actor on the international stage. But the politicians are short on time, and need to do what they can to capitalize on the momentum from the ongoing conflict before it escalates into another polarized showdown that could threaten Ukraine’s unity. |
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