EDITORIAL: Changing the rules of the game (01/04/04)

EDITORIAL

Changing the rules of the game

As the New Year begins, in Ukraine preparations by the candidates for the October 31 presidential elections should be well underway. A gnawing feeling exists, however, that it all may well be over before it begins. Some may say the elections are already decided.

On December 30, as Ukraine and the world turned their attention to the New Year at hand, the country's highest constitutional authority quietly handed down a ruling in which it stated that Mr. Kuchma should get a third term in office because a new Constitution, approved in 1996, had split his first five-year term, effectively making it a partial term. The Court based its decision on a clause of the new Constitution that stated that its provisions could not be enacted retroactively. The Court's spokesman in the case, Justice Vasyl Nimchenko, explained that the clause effectively made Mr. Kuchma's authority in his first two years in office part of the old Constitution, giving him the legal grounds to run again in 2004.

In another landmark ruling, last month the Constitutional Court decided that the election of the president by the Verkhovna Rada would not usurp the nation's right to elect its state leader directly, a ruling the parliamentary leadership then used to ram through initial approval for constitutional amendments that would give Ukraine a parliamentary/presidential form of government and the authority to elect the president. It is political reform that Mr. Kuchma is aggressively pursuing, at all costs it seems.

We believe the two rulings - especially the second one - have little ground to stand on. Experts on constitutional law, as well as Mr. Kuchma's critics, accuse him of manhandling the court and turning its justices into judicial stooges. And they may be right.

Elections are 10 months away, and the president has said repeatedly that he will not run again. But Mr. Kuchma has fretted over a "successor," to assure him a peaceful retirement. He has said that he would not consider resigning early in favor of a chosen replacement, much as Russian President Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Vladimir Putin, who in turn, gave him a guarantee of immunity from criminal prosecution for any actions committed during his presidential tenure.

With none of his colleagues and cronies able to build the popular base enjoyed by Ukraine's most popular politician, National Deputy Viktor Yushchenko, who is considered a presidential candidate, Mr. Kuchma worries that his retirement may be full of legal troubles, and possibly worse should Mr. Yushchenko win the October elections. So perhaps he would consider running for a third term to keep the presidential chair for his political purposes while one of his protégés works to gain prominence.

This would become especially convenient if the presidential forces that today control the Verkhovna Rada orchestrated a vocal "draft Kuchma" campaign. It seems that all the legal pieces are being put into place for such a scenario: to give a basis for Mr. Kuchma to be forced to "cave-in" and decide to run again.

Whether a majority of the Ukrainian people - public opinion polls show only about 6 percent of Ukrainians support Mr. Kuchma's leadership - are ready to respond positively to such a move by the Verkhovna Rada is a whole different matter. The Ukrainian nation, however, has shown in the past few years that rather than have their voice heard, it opts for kitchen talk and quiet complaining. Perhaps Mr. Kuchma's people believe that all would soon be forgotten after several hot months of protest.

While the president has stated firmly that he will not run again, a gut feeling remains that somehow the two rulings of the Constitutional Court are connected, and that Mr. Kuchma has already used the most powerful of his administrative tools to begin a re-election campaign in which his motto will be: "I will not run unless called; I will not serve unless asked."

If he has indeed manipulated Ukraine's Constitutional Court - what should be the country's most sacred government body - in getting these two controversial decisions handed down, then what would restrain his supporters from using all the other considerable government tools at their disposal, as some claim they have done in the past? If that is the case, then as the campaign season begins, we can safely assume that the elections are over.

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