Yulia Storms Back!

By Walter Kish

Ukraine’s Parliamentary elections have come and gone, and the early results are about what most of the responsible pollsters predicted, with only one big surprise.

As expected, Yanukovych got the most votes of the three major contenders (approximately 31 per cent), but he is in no position to cobble together a majority in Parliament. Together with his reactionary soul-mates, the Communists, and the rabid Vitrenko bloc, they account for no more than 40 per cent of the Parliamentary seats.

The big surprise was Yulia Tymo-shenko convin-cingly outstripping Yushchen-ko’s Our Ukraine bloc with about 23 per cent of the vote compared with its 15 per cent.  Obviously, a lot of the Orange Revolution’s former supporters wanted to send Yushchenko a clear message that they were more than a little disenchanted with his leadership and decision-making.

If truth be told, the election was simply an expensive and time-consuming exercise to determine whether Yushchenko or Tymoshenko would garner more votes and thereby claim the driver’s seat in any subsequent negotiations towards forming a new government. The decision was unequivocal, and with Tymoshenko so clearly ahead, Yushchenko will have to yield the Prime Minister’s chair to her.  Early signs indicate he is prepared to do just that.  A coalition of the Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and Socialist forces would provide a parliamentary majority of some 230 to 250 seats out of 450, depending on the final count.

Yulia has had her revenge. What is unclear is whether any new such coalition will last any longer than the last one.

There was much speculation in the past month that Yushchenko might work out another deal with Yanukovych rather than try to work again with Yulia, for whom he has obviously developed an irrational loathing.  Hopefully, the strong backlash over his deal with Yanukovych last year and the clear verdict of the electorate was enough to teach him that the supporters of the Orange Revolution viewed the act as nothing short of ideological treason, and any further such efforts would make him a lame-duck President, sure to be ousted in the next Presidential election.  Reviving the alliance with Yanukovych would have been political suicide.

That two other parties that appear to have managed to pass the minimum three-per cent barrier brought no real surprises.  The Communist party, in serious decline over the past decade, continued the downwards slide, coming in with just over four per cent of the vote.  Hopefully, this will mean we will get to see less of Petro Symonenko’s hypocritical pontificating in the media in the future.  The Socialists, under Oleksandr Moroz, earned their expected six to seven per cent of the vote, mostly on the personal strength of Moroz and fellow Socialist Lutsenko, who remain two of the most respected politicians in Ukraine today. It is doubtful that Verkhovna Rada Speaker Lytwyn’s bloc will make it past the three-per cent barrier. Similarly Natalya Vitrenko is unlikely to make it past the three-per cent barrier so we may be spared her rabid oratory during the next parliamentary term.

Overall, it was a disappointing and dispiriting election. Virtually all parties focused on flash rather than substance.  Hundreds of millions of dollars were spend on billboards and media ads. Television air waves were inundated with repetitive and often inane slogans endlessly repeated.  During the last week of the campaign, the whole of Khreshchatyk in downtown Kyiv was lined from end to end with the various parties’ brilliantly coloured tents and canopies.

Each party lambasted the corruption and incompetence of all the others while promising honesty, professionalism and good government from their own. There was very little real dialogue on the key issues, and still fewer concrete programs and solutions; mostly it was hype and promises with little detail or specifics to back them up.

 In the end, many people voted not so much for Yanukovych or Tymoshenko, as against Yushchenko’s disappointing record and lack of commitment to his revolutionary ideals.

One would have thought that Yushchenko’s forces would have come out with a hard-hitting election program outlining specific initiatives and goals. Perhaps embarrassed by all the failed expectations of this past year, he was reluctant to make any promises that he wasn’t certain he could carry through.  His timidity and his lack of a concrete program for the future do not engender much hope that we will see anything other than a very unstable couple of years of revolving governments.