ANALYSIS
Out with the old, in with the new: a wiser, firmer Leonid Kuchma?
by Markian Bilynskyj
PART I
In his November 30, 1999, inaugural address President Leonid Kuchma declared that during his first five years in office he had been "enriched by experience, both positive and negative."
"Today, I more fully and better understand what needs to be done and how to do it - as well as what should not be done. This confidence in my strengths and potential ... permits me to assert confidently you will see a new president," he said.
This refrain was introduced in the latter part of the president's re-election campaign. Absent any substantial first-term achievements, it had consisted primarily of fueling and exploiting a widespread fear of a return to Communist rule. The believability of any positive elements in the candidate's message depended in large measure on the plausibility of the president's claim that his first term had necessarily been an educative prelude to a qualitatively different president and presidency the second time around.
President Kuchma's choice of venue for the inauguration was replete with unintended irony. He had insisted, over the Verkhovna Rada's objections, that the ceremony be held in the Ukraina convention and concert hall, the reconstruction of which had generated all kinds of rumors concerning managerial incompetence, bureaucratic squabbling and, inevitably, outright peculation. If one allows this as a characterization of the general perception of government during the first Kuchma administration, then the future seemed to promise little more: a few days later the magician David Copperfield was scheduled to appear on the same stage and indulge the fantasies of a public with his own brand of more innocuous deception.
Yet, true to his word, President Kuchma began almost immediately to try to shed the vacillating, smoke-and-mirrors impression of his first-term reform effort. On December 3 he issued a decree "On Urgent Measures for Accelerating Reforms in the Agrarian Sector of the Economy" that restructures all forms of agricultural enterprise on the basis of privatized land. On December 15, at a plenary meeting of the Coordinating Committee on Combating Corruption and Organized Crime, the president emphasized the intolerable level of white-collar crime, particularly in the energy sector, and the rise of political extremism. In expressing his dissatisfaction with the committee's work, he ordered that a proposal for its comprehensive restructuring be prepared within a month.
That same day three decrees were issued on the reorganization of the central government bureaucracy, mandating a reduction in the number of ministries and other Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level committees and agencies from 89 to 35 and a corresponding decrease in personnel (with the exact numbers still to be established).
In rapid succession between December 5 and 9, President Kuchma visited Paris, Brussels, Moscow and Washington to inform the key constituencies in Ukraine's multi-vectored foreign policy of his reform plans and, more importantly, to try to convince them of the sincerity of his intentions.
The most significant step, however, concerned the selection of a new head of government. This move placed the above-mentioned measures - as well, obviously, as everything that follows - in a new context and raised hopes and expectations that, despite the massive amount of sustained effort required for their effective implementation, the incipient reforms were not just the latest manifestation of mute sound and fury.
On December 22, amid euphoria unmatched since the adoption of the Constitution in June 1996, the Verkhovna Rada confirmed Viktor Yuschenko as Ukraine's eighth prime minister by a record 296 votes. A week earlier, Valerii Pustovoitenko had failed by 20 votes to return to the position he had occupied for a record two-and-a-half years. His defeat aroused fears in some quarters of another drawn-out confrontation between, on the one hand, the Kuchma administration and the Verkhovna Rada, and, on the other, among the various interests within the Parliament itself along the lines of the 1998 wrangle over the selection of the Rada leadership.
Meeting with representatives of the regional media the day Mr. Pustovoitenko was rebuffed, President Kuchma labeled the Rada's rejection as unjustifiable, chided the deputies for their lack of cooperation, and revealed that he had no idea who his next nominee would be. A day later, on December 15, the president held consultations with moderate parliamentary parties and groups. He had already challenged the Verkhovna Rada to propose a candidate around whom they would be prepared to consolidate. On this occasion the 10 proposed the popular (not least because of his refusal to get overtly involved in politics) chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine, Mr. Yuschenko.
The following day, President Kuchma submitted his second nomination to the Verkhovna Rada despite not yet having received Mr. Yuschenko's formal assent. This was granted after Mr. Yuschenko (who by some accounts had declined the position in 1997) began consultations with the Rada and had also received assurances from the president that he would be given a two-year clean slate for the conduct of policy as well as the major say over the composition of the Cabinet.
On December 20 President Kuchma held another meeting with representatives (11 this time) of the parliamentary pro-reform factions and groups to gauge their commitment to forming a stable majority around a Yuschenko premiership. When it became clear that the vote would be by open ballot, Wednesday morning's procedure became a formality. The 11 represented approximately 260 votes, considerably more than the 226 needed for confirmation. With the party and faction leaders making a commitment to the president it was very unlikely that any single deputy would wish to invoke the president's displeasure by openly breaking rank over such an important issue.
The unprecedented size of the confirmation vote can be attributed to a favorable configuration of personality and circumstance. From the perspective of many of the deputies in the Verkhovna Rada, Mr. Yuschenko was acceptable because he is not associated with any particular interest group. Therefore, he had no political debts or obligations and, no less importantly, had yet to alienate any key non-left constituency. Nor was he prepared to begin immediately compromising his room for maneuver. Largely eschewing the conventional political horse-trading practiced by his predecessors, nominee Mr. Yuschenko appeared instead to prefer to rest his case largely on conviction, professional competence, integrity and the not insubstantial force of his personality. The effectiveness of this novel approach was reflected in the fact that even three members of Natalia Vitrenko's Progressive Socialist Party voted positively (and were expelled from the faction), as did most of Oleksander Moroz's "Left-of-Center" socialist group and the Peasant Party.
Pragmatism and charm played their part, but so did expediency. Undoubtedly, many deputies genuinely share Mr. Yuschenko's view of Ukraine's future. However, Ukrainian commentators and politicians were quick to point out the purely pragmatic or less than well-intentioned motives that may have led some to vote in his favor. Appearing before the Rada, the prime-minister-to-be declared: "Right from the start I draw your attention to a cardinally important point: we have very little time to act decisively, literally a few months. I don't wish to dramatize, but these are months that spell a last chance for Ukraine." Understandably, there are some reservations about the new prime minister's ability to cope with his unenviable inheritance. Some deputies therefore anticipate that their leverage with the new prime minister will increase as the realities of everyday governance assert themselves.
Then there are those who see Mr. Yuschenko's assumption of responsibility at a time when Ukraine faces the prospect of defaulting on its external debt repayments with its unpredictable domestic consequences as a way of discrediting a prospective competitor in the next presidential elections. Yet the composition of the vote clearly indicates that even Mr. Yuschenko's situational allies acknowledge the gravity of the general situation and appreciate that their political and business interests would not be immune from the effects of a worst-case scenario.
Another factor was the role played by President Kuchma. By all accounts his recent trip to Washington was far from comfortable. A frank assessment of the general tone of the meetings there was conveyed by the then acting Deputy Prime Minister Serhii Tyhypko when he revealed that: "If earlier they [Ukraine's creditors] believed what we said [regarding reforms], then today they don't trust our word. Moreover, now they don't even believe what we do. They believe only in tangible results. It was made clear to us that no more funds would be made available because of our 'geopolitical location' and that we could therefore end up being an Africa in the middle of Europe."
It is quite possible that prior to his Washington trip President Kuchma would have preferred to keep Mr. Pustvoitenko in office. But with Ukraine's principal strategic partner and creditors finally expressing their open dissatisfaction with the pace of reforms, Mr. Pustovoitenko's plodding incrementalism was now clearly insufficient, even a liability. Indeed, the president's return to Kyiv was accompanied by rumors that his Washington interlocutors had been blunt to the point of demanding the appointment of either a Yuschenko or a Tyhypko as prime minister. Be that as it may, the intensive consultations with the Rada on behalf of the Yuschenko candidacy - with the president insisting that he had no alternative candidate - contrasted starkly with the passivity the administration displayed when Mr. Pustovotenko lobbied the Parliament.
Moreover, the behavior of three pro-presidential parties and groups (the United Social Democrats, Regional Renewal and the Labor Party) also is instructive. They had publicly committed to Mr. Pustovoitenko but did not participate in the vote under the pretext, as a representative of one of them explained, that Ukraine needed a surgeon and not a masseur. While these groups had outstanding scores to settle with the prime minister and his National Democratic Party from the presidential campaign, their about-face strongly suggests that the prime minister's candidacy was simply abandoned, even undermined.
Considerations of how to translate the favorable correlation of forces that led to Prime Minister Yuschenko's appointment into a viable form of political cooperation have focused on two related processes: the consolidation of the Verkhovna Rada's Yuschenko confirmation vote into a stable, reform-oriented majority; and a renewed effort to harmonize the relationship between the Parliament, the government and the administration.
However, these efforts could well be smothered by a concerted administration-orchestrated campaign to hold a referendum on the Verkhovna Rada's structure and prerogatives leading to pre-term parliamentary elections. Such is the mixed political baggage with which Ukraine has entered the new year.
Markian Bilynskyj is director of the Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy in Kyiv.
PART I
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 23, 2000, No. 4, Vol. LXVIII
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