ANALYSIS: Kuchma replaces prime minister, and appoints a possible successor (12/08/02)

ANALYSIS

Kuchma replaces prime minister, and appoints a possible successor

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

On November 21, 234 deputies comprising the pro-presidential parliamentary majority from the eight factions that grew out of the For a United Ukraine election bloc and the Social Democratic-party United (SDPU) voted to support President Leonid Kuchma's candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, as Ukraine's 10th prime minister. All opposition groups on the left - the Communists and the Socialists - and on the right - Our Ukraine and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc - boycotted the vote, except for two deputies, one from Our Ukraine and one from the Socialist Party.

Two other candidates for prime minister, Mykola Azarov and Oleh Dubyna, also came from Ukraine's largest and wealthiest group of oligarchs, the so-called Donbas clan, as did Mr. Yanukovych.

The negative international impact of Mr. Yanukovych's appointment takes a backseat to ensuring President Kuchma's trouble-free exit from power and blocking Viktor Yushchenko as a potential successor as Ukrainian president. Leonid Kravchuk, SDPU faction leader and former president, said, "We can't insist on the ideal of what Europe's view of a prime minister should be."

Western media, which have already begun to compare Ukraine to Belarus, have reacted negatively to Mr. Yanukovych's appointment because of his close association with Rynat Akhmetov, Ukraine's wealthiest oligarch. The appointment could lead to a rerun of the disastrous Pavlo Lazarenko government of 1996-1997.

The timing of the appointment of the new prime minister - it coincided with the first day of the NATO summit in Prague - also will not help improve Ukraine's poor international image.

Dov Lynch, a resident research fellow at the European Union's Paris-based Institute for Security Studies, commented that: "The appointment does not send out a very hopeful message for Ukraine, and it only seems to confirm the marasmus in which the president finds himself domestically and internationally. He is in a hole and is only digging himself deeper."

Mr. Lynch said he believes that "the appointment looks unprofessional and [was] triggered much more by personal needs than the public good." He added, "There is certain amount of bewilderment and a large dose of disappointment with the turn of events in the last few years [in Ukraine]."

The model that Mr. Yanukovych brings from Donbas is of a "socially regulated market economy" combined with political authoritarianism. This model, according to Freedom House's annual survey "Nations in Transit," has become the norm in the Commonwealth of Independent States, including in Russia. In accordance with this model, stability is seen by the ruling elites as being of paramount importance. The opposition is marginalized by the authorities, whose refusal to compromise with them denies them any semblance of legitimacy. Their right to protest is condemned as creating instability and threatening the independent state.

Our Ukraine leader Viktor Yushchenko's attempts to create a "democratic majority" centered on Our Ukraine that could include oligarchic groups, except for the SDPU, and that would see him appointed as prime minister were blocked. President Kuchma also opposed a Polish-style roundtable that Mr. Yushchenko suggested and the Polish government offered to hold.

In Donbas all political life is controlled by the party of power, the Party of Regions. This allowed Mr. Kuchma to reduce the local base of support of his Communist opponents in the 1999 and 2002 elections. Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine failed to cross the four percent threshold only in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, where it obtained 2.69 and 3.62 percent of the vote, respectively, and in the city of Sevastopol, where it managed 2.99 percent. In comparison, Donetsk was the only oblast where For a United Ukraine came in first with 36.83 percent of the vote.

After the March elections, Ukrainian political scientists termed Mr. Yanukovych's Donbas model, which he wishes to apply to the remainder of Ukraine, as "Ukraine's Belarusianization."

"It is not something that will take Ukraine to Europe," Anatoliy Hrytsenko, head of the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies, noted.

The Yanukovych appointment will also lead to pressure in two other key areas. First, the new prime minister supports the transformation of the Verkhovna Rada into a bicameral Parliament where the upper house would be composed of regional representatives. This issue was not incorporated in the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine but was raised in the April 2000 constitutional referendum. In principle, a bicameral Parliament, where the same number of representatives is sent from each region regardless of the size of its population, would benefit western Ukraine, but it would simultaneously be bad for democratization, as Ukraine's oblast chairmen are appointed, unlike in Russia where they are elected. An unelected upper house, coupled with a pliant pro-presidential majority in the lower house, would transform the Rada into a puppet institution of the executive.

Second, Mr. Yanukovych may be pressed into elevating Russian into a second "official" (state) language. In early November, the Presidium of the Crimean Parliament, which has been controlled since the elections by pro-presidential oligarchs, sent an appeal supporting this move. The appeal was allegedly instigated by Viktor Medvedchuk, head of the presidential administration.

Will Mr. Yanukovych be President Kuchma's successor? The new government has a grace period of 18 months during which it cannot be dismissed by Parliament. This will lead up to the summer of 2004, when political life will be quiet, as Parliament will be in recess. This will also be just a few months before the presidential elections in October.

All opinion polls during the last two years have given Mr. Yushchenko popularity ratings of 25 to 30 percent. This is far higher than any pro-Kuchma oligarch, but insufficient on its own to win a presidential election. Ukraine's regional and linguistic divisions will have a negative impact on any chance of increasing Mr. Yushchenko's popularity in eastern Ukraine. Using the language card could undercut Mr. Yushchenko's already low popularity in eastern Ukraine.

In the 2004 presidential elections, what will be crucial to Mr. Kuchma will be Mr. Yanukovych's Donbas experience, whereby he blocked Our Ukraine in this year's elections. This could be coupled with a rerun of the manner in which the language card was successfully used by Mr. Kuchma himself against the "nationalist" incumbent, Mr. Kravchuk, in the 1994 elections. Mr. Yanukovych's appointment, therefore, makes Mr. Yushchenko's victory in 2004 more problematic.

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies and an adjunct staffer in the department of political science, University of Toronto.

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