Rada majority to support single presidental candidate (02/22/04)

Rada majority to support single presidental candidate

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The political parties and factions that comprise the Verkhovna Rada majority signed a political agreement on February 18 to support a single candidate in the October 31 presidential elections as the candidate picture for the upcoming elections became slightly less murky.

The 13 leaders, including Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who also heads the Party of Regions, agreed to form a coalition for both the October presidential elections and the parliamentary elections in 2006. They also pledged to continue to support passage of a controversial law on political reform that would amend the Constitution of Ukraine.

"Today we have begun the establishment of a wide coalition of democratic powers, which I am sure will become the core of a larger unity movement throughout Ukraine," explained Mr. Yanukovych at the outset of a press conference after the signing.

The agreement states that this latest agreement is another in a series of agreements between the Verkhovna Rada majority and the Yanukovych government from December 7, 2002, and December 25, 2003, that have increased intergovernmental cooperation and allowed political reform to proceed.

Prime Minister Yanukovych said that because the coalition had been able to hold together for more than a year under difficult conditions - all the while showing its ability to find compromise - he was optimistic that it would remain united through October and beyond.

National Deputy Leonid Kravchuk, head of the Social Democratic (United) faction and a prominent leader of the majority coalition said he believed a specific candidate for president would be named during a forum of the majority forces currently scheduled for March.

Four oppositionist political groupings within the Verkhovna Rada, the Socialist, Communist, Tymoshenko and Our Ukraine factions did not sign the document.

While the extensive list of possible presidential hopefuls has been known in Ukraine for some time now, who would actually commit to the process has remained unclear. However, the picture became a bit less murky this week when, first, National Deputy Oleksander Moroz, leader of the Socialist Party and a perennial presidential hopeful, indicated during a television news program on February 15 that he could not support his fellow oppositionist leader Viktor Yushchenko of the Our Ukraine political bloc. He said he would seriously consider a nomination proposal from his party.

Then, Communist Party Vice-Chairman Adam Martyniuk, who also holds the post of first vice-chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, said the next day he believed that by October the individual leaders of the four oppositionist factions each would have announced their candidacies.

While Mr. Yushchenko of the national democratic force Our Ukraine and Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko have not yet officially put themselves in the running for the presidency, almost no one believes either one will stay out of the race.

However, the plans of the fourth oppositionist leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, of the eponymous political party, are far less understood. There has been much political talk regarding overtures from the Our Ukraine bloc for her party's support of Mr. Yushchenko, but it is also evident that the former prime minister has too much political debt already and would not be in a position to offer her the prime minister's job, which she would want in return.

While there have been several candidates-in-waiting on the other side of the political aisle, now that the parties and factions of the majority coalition have agreed to put forward a single candidate, the political dance to determine who will get the nod during the March forum should start coming to an end.

Mr. Kravchuk, whose party does not have the closest of ties to the prime minister, indicated in an interview on February 10 with Stolychni Novyny, a Kyiv daily newspaper, around whom the pro-presidential political majority was beginning to close when he said he could support Mr. Yanukovych's candidacy.

"He has put his region in such good political and economic condition that we can confidently give him the highest marks," explained Mr. Kravchuk.

The former president called the Donetsk Oblast, where Mr. Yanukovych was chairman before being appointed prime minister last year, "practically a country," with its 10-million-plus population.

Even if the majority decided to support his candidacy for president, Mr. Yanukovych would continue to have a popularity problem among the electorate. While his ratings had risen steadily since he became a national figure last year, the most recent survey taken by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and the Democratic Initiative Fund showed that they had dropped to 9.2 percent support of the electorate in January after reaching a high of 10.3 percent in October of last year. Currently Mr. Yanukovych trails Mr. Yushchenko in the polls.

Mr. Yushchenko, who has led most all popularity polls for well over nearly two years is in first place with a 22 percent rating, which was still a drop of four points from his October rating. Petro Symonenko finished third in the polling, with 8.9 percent support, a considerable drop from his 15 percent standing in October.

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