KYIV – As the implications of the historic landslide victory by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party sink in, important clues and details have been emerging about how its leaders see their next steps, priorities and challenges.
The crucial issue for them at this stage is to have the new Verkhovna Rada in place as soon as is possible and for their victorious and majority party to put its representatives in key positions both within the Parliament and in the new government. Only then will it be possible to move ahead with promised new laws and a revamping of institutions and policies.
President Zelenskyy and others have expressed the hope that the new Verkhovna Rada could be convened on Ukrainian Independence Day on August 24. But this now seems unlikely because several of the results in the parliamentary elections are still being contested in court. The head of the Presidential Office, Andriy Bohdan, said on July 30 that, because of the lawsuits, he doubts the new Parliament will be able to start its work by September 1.
In the meantime, the new president and his lieutenants have acknowledged that their hastily cobbled together party, with its diverse composition and its vulnerability to internal fragmentation, requires consolidation, orderliness and a clearer sense of direction.
Right now the question of who will be President Zelenskyy’s chief officers in the new Parliament and government is uppermost in minds of both his party and its potential allies and opponents. What is at stake is not only the positions of speaker of the Verkhovna Rada and two deputies, but also the head of the party’s parliamentary faction, and chairs of various parliamentary committees. And then there are posts of prime minister and other members of the Cabinet.
According to the 24Kanal TV Channel, at his first meeting with all the newly elected national duties from his party on July 25, Mr. Zelenskyy “devoted quite a lot of attention to the question of unity and discipline.” This week, all of them were taken for a retreat in the Carpathian resort town of Truskavets, not only for a crash course in governance and economics, but evidently also for team-building purposes.
The question of appointments is linked to whether Servant of the People will decide to enter into a formal coalition with other parties in the Rada, the two logical candidates being rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk’s Holos party with 20 seats and Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party with 26 seats. Servant of the People has 254 seats, and only 226 votes are needed for a simple majority. But to push through constitutional amendments, 300 votes are needed.
So far, Servant of the People’s leaders have indicated that, with their strong majority, they do not need to form a coalition or share posts with others. For instance, President Zelenskyy’s representative in the Cabinet of Ministers, Andriy Gerus. told the media on July 29 that his party intends to fill all the ministerial posts. He thinks that some of the parliamentary committees might be given to the opposition, “so that no one has any doubts about the democratic nature of the new power…”
According to experts, the leader of the Servant of the People Party, Dmytro Razumkov, 35, is the clear favorite to become the new speaker of the Verkhovna Rada. This calm, young and highly intelligent political technologist quickly rose to prominence during the presidential election as Mr. Zelenskyy’s advisor and main spokesman.
Servant of the People has not yet said definitely whether it will want the first deputy speaker’s post, and many observers believe the party will not concede it. The professorial Ruslan Stefanchuk, considered the party’s “ideologue,” is the leading candidate, though some observers think he might become head of the parliamentary faction instead.
The more intriguing question is whether Servant of the People will yield the second deputy speaker’s position to another party. Mr. Razumkov has indicated this is under consideration. If so, the pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life, which obtained the second largest number of seats (43), will hope to get it. And that could lead to Viktor Medvedchuk, the notorious associate of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, being proposed for the position.
According to political analyst Maksym Vozniak, Mr. Zelenskyy is still “too angry” with former President Petro Poroshenko after the acrimonious presidential election, and Mr. Medvedchuk is “too toxic” a figure to be accepted. On the other hand, giving the post to the Holos party could cement a valuable tacit alliance.
Representatives of Servant of the People have confirmed that the first priorities for the new Parliament will be to complete the work left undone by the previous Verkhovna Rada, namely to lift the immunity from the deputies, proscribe the illegal enrichment of officials and adopt a law allowing for the impeachment of the president. After that, their emphasis will be on more effective legal reform, stepping up efforts to curb corruption, enhancing legislation dealing with decentralization and liberalizing the economy.
President Zelenskyy has made it clear that for prime minister he wants an economist, technocrat and political newcomer. This has undoubtedly dashed the hopes of former Prime Minister Tymoshenko and of current Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. Several names have been floated, but no favorite has been identified. The position of prime minister is all the more important because, according to Article 113 of the Ukrainian Constitution, in the event of the president being unable to fulfill his duties, the prime minister serves as interim president with limited powers.
In the case of a replacement for Yuriy Lutsenko as prosecutor general, President Zelenskyy himself has pointed to Ruslan Ryaboshapka as his preferred candidate. But Mr. Lutsenko has refused to go and is hanging on for as long as possible.
While President Zelenskyy’s team has been focusing on preparing for the challenges ahead, other noteworthy developments have made the news. Several of them involve Mr. Poroshenko. Firstly, he has had to appear at the office of the State Bureau of Investigation to provide evidence in the first of 11 cases of corruption that are being investigated.
Secondly, Mr. Poroshenko has been targeted in two separate mudslinging exercises involving his former political colleagues, Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov and Prime Minister Groysman. Both have confirmed their complete break with him, accusing him in public of being dishonest and self-serving. Both ministers will probably soon be without jobs and apparently want to distance themselves from the Poroshenko era.
Meanwhile, after the election, the Zelenskyy team has tempered its own rhetoric and menacing warnings. Most notably, it appears to have backed down on its threat to lustrate all the officials who had served during the Poroshenko administration – a move that was promptly condemned by Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic friends.