KYIV – Ukraine’s coalition government approached the brink of collapse after the Verkhovna Rada failed on February 16 to muster enough votes to dismiss the highly unpopular prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and his Cabinet of Ministers.
The Samopomich and Batkivshchyna parties announced in the following days that they were exiting the coalition government, accusing national deputies of the biggest parties of abandoning the principles of the Euro-Maidan that reached its bloody conclusion nearly two years earlier to the date.
“A union of power has become obvious between the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, the People’s Front (led by Mr. Yatsenyuk), and the fragments of the Party of Regions that are controlled by a series of oligarchs,” said a February 18 statement by the Samopomich party leadership.
“Such actions delegitimize the government of Ukraine. They are an encroachment on the country’s order and they put a final end to the ‘European Ukraine’ parliamentary coalition. It’s particularly cynical that such a union was formed on the eve of the anniversary of the shooting of patriots on the Maidan and the tragic events at Debaltseve,” the statement noted.
Without Self-Reliance and Batkivshchyna, the parliamentary coalition has 217 votes between the Poroshenko Bloc and People’s Front parties – nine votes short of a needed majority.
Oleh Liashko, the head of the Radical Party that was the fifth faction that formed the coalition, claimed this week that his Radical Party left the coalition on September 1, 2015, though no official document was reported at the time.
Early parliamentary elections will have to be held if a new coalition doesn’t emerge in the next 30 days, according to election law.
Yet Yuriy Lutsenko, the head of the Poroshenko Bloc parliamentary faction, kept the door open for a new coalition to emerge, possibly involving the faction led by Mr. Liashko, who “comes and goes very quickly.”
Mr. Lutsenko proposed a new coalition agreement in which a precise month-by-month plan is laid out for each minister to fulfill, along with a corresponding plan for approving legislation in Parliament.
Ironically, the president and his allies led a fierce attack campaign in August 2015 against Mr. Liashko, who at the time accused the president of corruption and persecution. Yet Ukrainian politics are notorious for their constantly shifting alliances, particularly between former enemies.
On February 17, it was Mr. Liashko who was in the driver’s seat. He confirmed reports that he communicated with all the key power brokers – including a telephone conversation with Mr. Poroshenko and an evening meeting with Mr. Yatsenyuk, Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov and National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov – to discuss ways to save the coalition from collapse.
“We’re talking about forming a new coalition,” he told the pravda.com.ua news site. “We are talking about reformatting the coalition, a new coalition program, and a new government program of action. It’s impossible to return what isn’t there. There is no coalition.”
The current political crisis was ignited with the February 3 resignation of Aivaras Abromavicius, the economic development and trade minister, followed by the February 15 resignation of Deputy Procurator General Vitaliy Kasko, both of whom have been backed by Western governments as dedicated reformers.
Since then, President Poroshenko has been under pressure to convince the West of his commitment to reform. His trusted confidante Viktor Shokin, the procurator general firmly opposed by Washington for alleged corruption, reportedly submitted a resignation letter on February 16 upon the president’s public request.
Mr. Shokin’s resignation, which has yet to be approved by the Verkhovna Rada, satisfied a U.S. demand connected to a $1 billion loan guarantee that was reported by the dt.ua news site in late January, citing anonymous sources.
In the same statement, Mr. Poroshenko also demanded Mr. Yatsenyuk’s resignation, which the prime minister duly ignored. After the no-confidence vote, Poroshenko Bloc Parliamentary Chair Lutsenko announced a three-week deadline for Mr. Yatsenyuk to form a new Cabinet.
That has given the president the pretext to delay Mr. Shokin’s official resignation until he finds a replacement that fits his needs, said Petro Oleshchuk, an assistant professor of political science at Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv. Unfortunately, the replacement is not likely to be much of an improvement, he said.
“In all likelihood, Shokin’s resignation will be submitted simultaneously with the approval of the new candidate,” Mr. Oleshchuk said. “In which case, against a backdrop of joy that an offensive figure will have been gotten rid of, they’ll easily push through someone else no less offensive.”
Indeed, it was widely believed in Kyiv that the entire February 16 spectacle in the Verkhovna Rada was orchestrated by the president, including the demand that Mr. Yatsenyuk resign and the failed vote that followed.
Only 194 national deputies backed the no-confidence vote, while a 226-vote majority was needed. Its biggest support came from the Self-Reliance, Batkivshchyna and Radical parties.
The measure was rejected by Mr. Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party, the Opposition Bloc sponsored by Rinat Akhmetov, and the two oligarch-backed groups of deputies – Rebirth and Will of the People.
Most significantly, 39 out of 136 Poroshenko Bloc deputies didn’t even support the no-confidence vote, despite the president’s call for Mr. Yatsenyuk’s resignation.
“With all due respect to many of my colleagues who gave their votes for the government’s resignation, you were used,” wrote Poroshenko Bloc National Deputy Mustafa Nayyem on his Facebook page. “Thirty votes of our colleagues disappeared at the most critical moment. To think that this happened by chance, without approval from the Presidential Administration and the faction’s leadership, is naïve and foolish. Today’s session has left no doubt that there’s no desire to change anything in this mud, neither on Bankova nor on Hrushevsky streets. Their comfort zone has dulled their sense of reality.”
The vote was evidence of how determined Ukraine’s oligarchs and political power brokers are to maintain the status quo, political experts said.
It’s apparent that Mr. Yatsenyuk has an alliance with the billionaires Mr. Akhmetov and Igor Kolomoisky, while Mr. Poroshenko has an alliance with billionaire Dmytro Firtash that dates back to his election campaign in 2014, Mr. Oleshchuk said.
“The oligarchic consensus has ceased to be an analytical artifact. It’s publicly on the record,” Serhiy Datsyuk, a philosopher and political observer, stated on his Facebook page. “Pro-oligarch deputies not voting for the Cabinet’s dismissal will lead to the political death of the consensus’s representatives. A deep political crisis began from that moment that can’t be resolved on the legal field anymore.”
At the same time, the experts agreed the current infighting and corruption can’t go on in a time of economic misery and war.
Despite the current attempts to keep the current coalition on life support, and despite the fierce desire of Western governments to maintain stability in Ukraine, early parliamentary elections are inevitable, in the view of Mr. Oleshchuk.
“The danger in not holding early elections is far greater than the risks of holding them,” he said. “But we can’t resolve the current problems without changing the election law. It’s absurd to spend hundreds of millions on new elections only to bring the same people to the Rada. The rules of the game have to change.”