Yushchenko and Tymoshenko call for creation of parliamentary majority (08/14/05)

Yushchenko and Tymoshenko call for creation of parliamentary majority

by Taras Kuzio
Eurasia Daily Monitor

After Ukraine's Parliament recessed for summer on July 8, the government issued a damning indictment of Parliament and Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn for not facilitating the passage of legislation required for Ukraine to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the fall (kmu.gov.ua, July 8). Mr. Lytvyn wanted the entire Parliament to condemn the government statement, but only the Communist, Socialist and a few centrist parties agreed. Other centrists and, not surprisingly, Our Ukraine and the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc refused to sign.

Hostility to Mr. Lytvyn unites both Prime Minister Tymoshenko and members of the Reform and Order party who, in the 2002 parliamentary election, were members of President Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc. These include key government ministers such as Finance Minister Viktor Pynzenyk, First Deputy Prime Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Mykola Tomenko, and Economics Minister Serhii Teriokhin.

Reform and Order's alliance with Ms. Tymoshenko belies the view that she is a "socialist," as all three ministers advocate market-economy reforms. Other members of the government, such as Minister of Justice Roman Zvarych, have lined up behind Mr. Yushchenko by being loyal to National Security and Defense Council Secretary Petro Poroshenko, whom Ms. Tymoshenko keeps at a distance.

Since Mr. Yushchenko's election Reform and Order has drifted away from Our Ukraine and closer to Ms. Tymoshenko for four reasons.

First, Reform and Order has quarreled with Our Ukraine over who owns the "Our Ukraine" brand name. In summer 2004, the party renamed itself "Our Ukraine," thereby confusing the electorate because there was already an Our Ukraine party (led by Mr. Pynzenyk) and an Our Ukraine parliamentary bloc (led by Mr. Yushchenko). In July the Ministry of Justice ordered the return of the Our Ukraine name from Reform and Order to Mr. Yushchenko. The ruling occurred a few days ahead of the Our Ukraine congress.

Second, Reform and Order sympathizes with Ms. Tymoshenko's dislike for businessmen in the Yushchenko camp, such as Mr. Poroshenko. Members fear that their continued presence will lead Ukrainian voters to eventually come to believe that "oligarchs" exist in both the Yushchenko team and the former Leonid Kuchma, now opposition, camp.

The continued presence of big businessmen in the Yushchenko camp will make it difficult to separate business and politics. Mr. Yushchenko made this distinction a major campaign issue to differentiate himself from the cozy and corrupt relationships that oligarchs had with the Kuchma administration.

Mr. Poroshenko and other businessmen around Mr. Yushchenko are also less antagonistic than Ms. Tymoshenko and Reform and Order toward former pro-Kuchma oligarchs. Mr. Poroshenko dislikes Ms. Tymoshenko's anti-oligarch populism and often tries to temper it. At the same time, Mr. Poroshenko and Mr. Yushchenko need Ms. Tymoshenko's anti-oligarch populism to attract voters in the 2006 election.

Third, Reform and Order, like other national democratic parties such as Rukh (led by Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk) and the Ukrainian People's Party (led by Yurii Kostenko), is refusing to merge into Mr. Yushchenko's new party of power, People's Union-Our Ukraine. Instead, they are proposing that the 2002 Our Ukraine bloc of parties be reanimated. If this revival fails, the national democratic parties will join the Tymoshenko bloc, which includes Ms. Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party.

Fourth, and most importantly, Reform and Order's leaders and Ms. Tymoshenko disagree with Mr. Yushchenko and Mr. Poroshenko over the expediency of aligning with Lytvyn's People's Party of Ukraine (PPU) in the 2006 parliamentary election. Reform and Order government members agree with Fatherland and other parties in the Tymoshenko bloc that Mr. Lytvyn should not be part of the pro-Yushchenko 2006 election coalition.

Mr. Poroshenko and Mr. Lytvyn are close allies from the Kuchma era, when Mr. Poroshenko was a Kuchma loyalist and Mr. Lytvyn was head of the presidential administration. Mr. Poroshenko only went into opposition after a parliamentary vote of no confidence dissolved Mr. Yushchenko's government in April 2001.

Ms. Tymoshenko has made two demands of Mr. Yushchenko for the 2006 election, and the president has little choice but to concede. Alone, his People's Union-Our Ukraine party can attract a maximum of only one-third of the electorate.

The first demand is that Ms. Tymoshenko remains prime minister until the 2006 election. The second demand is to exclude Mr. Lytvyn's PPU from the 2006 election coalition (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, Aug. 3).

In order not to repeat the bedlam seen in Parliament in June-July and to take control over the legislature ahead of the 2006 election, Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko aim to ready a pro-Yushchenko majority for when Parliament reconvenes in September. At first, Mr. Lytvyn ruled out the idea, claiming it would be as ineffectual as the pro-Kuchma and pro-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych situational parliamentary majority after the 2002 election. But later, fearing that if he did not support, he would be marginalized, Mr. Lytvyn flip-flopped and began to support the idea.

Any parliamentary majority created without Mr. Lytvyn's support would inevitably lead to the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko coalition supporting a vote to replace him with a more agreeable speaker. Mr. Lytvyn became parliamentary speaker in May 2002 by only one vote above the required 225, a vote that was "loaned" by a dissident Communist.

But where would the proposed parliamentary majority come from? The four factions that would support such a majority have only 155 deputies. They include Our Ukraine (77), Tymoshenko's bloc (39), Mr. Kostenko's Ukrainian People's Party (24) and First Deputy Prime Minister Anatolii Kinakh's Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs with 15.

Our Ukraine's parliamentary leader, Mykola Martynenko, described his own faction, Ms. Tymoshenko's, and Mr. Kostenko's as "constructive parliamentary forces." He added the Socialist Party (SPU), Mr. Lytvyn's PPU and the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs to this "constructive" group, but with reservations (razom.org.ua, July 14).

If the SPU (25) and Mr. Lytvyn's PPU (46) were to join the new parliamentary majority, then it would have a slim majority of only 226 deputies. Other possible members could be the former pro-Kuchma United Ukraine faction (20) and some deputies who are unaffiliated (37). But, if this were to transpire, the same criticism would be repeated; namely, that the pro-Yushchenko parliamentary majority includes, and relies upon, discredited members of the former Kuchma camp.

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