EDITORIAL: Coalition needs unity, perseverance (01/23/00)

EDITORIAL

Coalition needs unity, perseverance

As Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine's first president and now a leading national deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, announced the formation of the long-awaited centrist parliamentary majority, beside him sat a veritable and unwieldy spectrum of Ukraine's stewards of democracy: from National Deputy Viktor Pynzenyk, the conservative, solidly pro-West economic monetarist, to Yulia Tymoshenko, who has offered a Western-oriented vision, but whose dealings, especially in the business world, lean towards the East, on to Vitalii Kononov, the leader of the ecology-minded Green Party and representatives of everything in between.

The group, which calls itself the Coordinating Council, counts 11 of the Verkhovna Rada's 15 parliamentary factions. Its members claim they have found common agreement to break the legislative paralysis in Parliament and work on a general agenda to lift Ukraine from its economic morass and to set the country on a proper course.

Intentions of a high order, indeed, and absolutely needed. But one of the first things that reporters present at the press conference announcing the new coalition questioned was the degree and the depth of the commitment of the 241 national deputies to vote as a single bloc on major issues. What was the uniting factor?

Ms. Tymoshenko readily admitted that a single ideology did not bind them. Mr. Kravchuk, however, thought otherwise. He explained that the group stood on "the ideology of democracy, state-building, independence and the need to make the Parliament effective."

Although the last part of Mr. Kravchuk's statement does not constitute a political ideology, it is probably the best glue the parliamentary majority has to hold it together. Each of the 11 factions, and probably more importantly their leaders, have very different aims and ambitions. None of them, however, is gaining any political advantage in the stalemate that has not allowed this Verkhovna Rada in the first two years of its four-year mandate to approve any substantial laws on tax reform, administrative overhaul, and new criminal and civil codes.

The past shows that a difficult future awaits the parliamentary majority. Under the umbrella of the new coalition are parties that have bickered vehemently, and at times pointlessly, over policy and political nuance. The group includes the two Rukh parties and others that were once single political entities that split over organizational problems or matters of leadership and ego.

The task before the Coordinating Council is to properly harness the 241 voices that make up its composition, to find the issues that are crucial and to keep its eye on the big picture: improving democracy and passing economic reform legislation. If the majority's leadership tries to steer the group to support narrow interests, the signatures of the members will not have dried before another golden opportunity for a democratically run, truly representative Parliament sinks to the bottom of the political depths.

The Coordinating Council's first effort, needed to gather leverage for its political agenda, revealed the huge task before it, and quickly tempered undue optimism. As the majority had promised, on January 18 it proposed a change in the Verkhovna Rada procedures to mandate that all floor votes, except where delineated in the Constitution, must be recorded by name. The goal was to force the voting records of the national deputies out into the open, to increase discipline among faction members and reduce backroom deals made by individuals outside their factions.

Ironically, in a secret vote the initiative captured only 207 votes, even though the majority numbers 241. When Rada Chairman Oleksander Tkachenko relented under heavy pressure and allowed a second, recorded vote, suddenly 226 votes appeared in support of the proposal.

The initiative, which was ultimately struck down by the ineffective and divisive Parliament speaker on a dubious technicality, goes to the core of the central problem that the majority will have to overcome: to keep its members focused on the ultimate aim and keep them from drifting back to the self-interests that have come to characterize the work of the national deputies.

Mr. Pynzenyk, one of the early organizers of the coalition, said after the parliamentary majority was announced: "What we have here is an agreement to work to reach compromise agreements on issues. There are many interests at work here, and whether we can maintain this will only be seen."

To strengthen the glue that binds them, the majority must remember that their effectiveness may be their only tool against a president who seems to be hell-bent on dismissing this group of parliamentarians and trying to shape the next Verkhovna Rada more to his liking. To be effective, it will have to show unity and perseverance of a type never before seen among the member factions in this, a most combative and divided, legislative body.

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