KYIV – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko confidently declared this week that Ukraine’s political crisis is over after the new Cabinet was elected on April 14.
Yet the voting in the Verkhovna Rada at the April 21 session proved otherwise.
Rada Chair Andriy Parubiy asked national deputies to vote to include on the daily agenda a bill that would relax requirements for the procurator general, aimed at enabling Yuriy Lutsenko, the current head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction, to become the president’s nominee.
Despite noting that the president considered the bill’s approval “urgent,” Mr. Parubiy could muster only 177 out of the needed 226 votes in favor.
The failure not only threatened the president’s planned nomination of Mr. Lutsenko, but also called into question whether a parliamentary coalition exists at all, particularly after the questionable means that were used to form it.
“There’s friction so far between the different political groups in the coalition,” said Sergiy Taran, the director of the International Institute of Democracy in Kyiv. “There isn’t any agreement on voting and they’re still agreeing on the new procurator general law. If voting won’t be unified, we will consistently have this problem.”
The main changes to the law on the procurator general proposed in the rejected legislation include removing the requirement that the candidate have a law degree, as well as 10 years of work in a legal profession.
Mr. Lutsenko falls short on both criteria. His most relevant work experience is his two years as internal affairs minister, when he led Ukraine’s police force and introduced minimal reforms, while corruption thrived.
Mr. Poroshenko is lobbying Mr. Lutsenko’s candidacy because he needs someone he can trust and influence, experts said, and at the same time someone who is acceptable to the West.
When Mr. Poroshenko visited Washington at the beginning of the month, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden told the president that $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees depend on his nomination of an independent procurator general committed to reforms.
These sentiments were echoed on April 16 by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, who indicated that the new IMF tranche of $1.7 billion also depends on an acceptable procurator general.
“Appointing Lutsenko as procurator general means the very same [Viktor] Shokin will be leading it,” Viktor Nebozhenko, director of the Ukrainian Barometer Sociological Service, told the gazeta.ua news site on April 20. “Lutsenko fears lifting his head before the president. We’d be getting a cardboard prosecutor, not a real one.”
With someone like Mr. Lutsenko leading the prosecution, Mr. Poroshenko is forming a regime of personal power and a repressive state apparatus, said Mr. Nebozhenko, a view that was supported by Serhiy Gaiday, a Kyiv political consultant who worked with Mr. Poroshenko in the past.
He told The Ukrainian Weekly he believes the president is usurping power, echoing claims made by pro-Western opposition leaders Oleh Liashko and Yulia Tymoshenko.
Serhiy Leshchenko, a national deputy with the Poroshenko Bloc, said on his Facebook page that the April 21 vote failed because two deputies’ groups, Renaissance and Will of the People, are blackmailing the president for more concessions in exchange for their support.
The president might need to reach agreement with them for lack of support among his own forces.
The de facto coalition that emerged on April 14 between the Poroshenko Bloc and the People’s Front party has only 222 deputies officially registered as of April 21, according to the Rada’s website. That’s four short of the necessary majority.
The failed vote showed the coalition doesn’t exist, Mr. Leshchenko wrote, repeating the claims made last week by Mr. Liashko and Ms. Tymoshenko, who criticized the tactics used to form the coalition.
Those tactics involved keeping the previous coalition of five pro-Western factions in place on a de jure basis, while at the same time recruiting independent national deputies to join the Poroshenko Bloc in an attempt to swell the ranks of the two largest factions forming the de facto coalition to more than 226 deputies.
Verkhovna Rada Chair Parubiy claimed as recently as April 18 that 230 national deputies are in the parliamentary coalition, yet proof has yet to emerge.
Meanwhile, experts were hard-pressed to name other possible candidates for procurator general who would satisfy both the West’s calls for reform and the president’s appetite for control.