Still no chairman for Verkhovna Rada after eight rounds of deputies' voting (06/21/98)

Still no chairman for Verkhovna Rada after eight rounds of deputies' voting

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - After two more rounds of voting, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada still has not settled on who will lead the parliamentary body.

During the latest attempts, which brings the total to eight, the national deputies again have failed to elect two prominent leftists and now an independent to the post of chairman.

Many here thought the new Parliament would be more effective because political party discipline had been introduced by virtue of a new election law, but six weeks after the parliamentarians were seated there is no chairman and not a single new law.

On June 18 the Verkhovna Rada came close to electing a leader on its eighth try. Communist faction leader Petro Symonenko ended up five votes shy of the 226 ballots needed for a majority in the Parliament to elect a chairman. It was the fifth time he had been nominated. His 221 votes, however, only made it plain that another round of voting with another group of candidates would take place.

But it gave deputies on the left hope that, after more backroom brokering, Mr. Symonenko would achieve a majority. Ivan Chyzh of the Socialist faction said that Mr. Symonenko could get elected in the ninth round. "I think that five votes is not a significant barrier to overcome," said Mr. Chyzh.

Mr. Symonenko's near success came after the nomination of Mykhailo Syrota, a non-aligned centrist candidate, failed in the previous round. Mr. Syrota is a person who many thought had a chance to unite the ideologically divided and stalled Parliament.

However, in the seventh round of voting, Mr. Syrota, called "the godfather of the Constitution" because of his persistence in moving the Constitution through the Verkhovna Rada to ratification in June 1996 in a marathon all-night session, could garner only 118 votes for the post of chairman. Many national deputies had stated prior to the vote that in Mr. Syrota, perhaps, they had finally found an electable candidate.

It was not to be because Mr. Syrota, who was elected as an independent and decided not to re-join the pro-presidential National Democratic faction to which he previously belonged, did not receive the full support of the faction's members.

As National Deputy Mykhailo Ratushnyi said when he qualified a suggestion that Mr. Syrota may be the ideal candidate two days before the nomination failed: "It all depends on the faction."

The National Democrats have brought negotiations between the left and right political blocs to a standstill by their insistence that one of their own should get the chairmanship. Rumors flowed after the seventh round that an agreement had finally been reached for a package vote for which the four centrist factions united in a temporary coalition had been calling since the attempt to elect a chairman began in early May. The package - the only way by which the centrist coalition believes that a Verkhovna Rada presidium will be able to be elected - would have an NDP representative in the chairman's seat, with a Communist as first vice-chair and a member of the Rukh faction as second vice-chair.

The Communists issued an official statement on June 17 accusing the four centrist factions, the National Democrats, Rukh, the Social Democrats (United) and the Greens, of sabotaging the procedure for the election of a chairman. "The factions of the National Rukh, the NDP, SDP(U) and the Green Party are busy launching a new spiral of attacks aimed at the destruction of Ukrainian parliamentarism and discrediting national deputies," the statement read.

After six weeks the whole process has become what one deputy speaking from the floor of the assembly hall called "a theater of the absurd." While parliamentarians continue to accuse one another of blocking the election of a chairman, some have now taken to making comic suggestions as to what the Parliament needs to do to elect a leader.

"I think that we need to hold a simple lottery of those deputies interested in the chairman's seat," said Volodymyr Cherniak of the National Rukh faction. "The winner becomes the chairman."

Other national deputies have proposed from the floor of the Parliament that the factions each choose a representative, who then will take turns chairing the daily sessions on a weekly basis.

A third proposal was that all those deputies who have no desire for the chairmanship submit their names; the rest would then rotate the position among themselves on a weekly basis.

With no end in sight in this process, and the list of realistic candidates growing shorter with every vote, many national deputies also have taken to making quips about the still youthful Parliament's political impotence.

National Deputy Viktor Roienko of the Hromada Party told the Verkhovna Rada that he is not sure that national deputies really understand who they are electing. "Are we electing a head of the Verkhovna Rada or a speaker? I think we are looking for a head, because if it was a speaker we were searching for we would have found him long ago," said Mr. Roienko, referring to the verbosity of his colleagues.