The End of the Revolution

By Walter Kish

Friday July 7 will likely go down in history as the day the Orange Revolution finally died, a victim of the inadequacy, selfishness, narrow-mindedness, egotism and sheer incompetence of the so-called leaders that brought it about. 

Earlier in the week, it had seemed that after three months of tortuous negotiations following the March parliamentary elections, a deal had finally been struck by the three main factions that had formed the original Orange coalition, namely Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine, Tymoshenko’s bloc, and Oleksander Moroz’s Socialist party.  A main stumbling block had been the insistence by Yushchenko and his faction that the key financer of Our Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, be speaker of the new Parliament, a post coveted by Oleksander Moroz.  Ostensibly, this was to serve as a counterweight to Tymoshenko becoming Prime Minister again, an eventuality that Yushchenko apparently found morbidly hard to accept. 

At first, it appeared that Moroz last week had conceded the Speaker’s chair. However when it came to the vote in parliament, Moroz pulled a shocking double cross, and having secured the support of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and the Communists, got himself elected Speaker.  Shortly thereafter he announced that he was joining the Regions party and the Communists in a new coalition that would see Yanukovych becoming Prime Minister once again. 

Until last week, I, like many other Ukrainians, had always thought Moroz to be a man of principle and integrity and a strong supporter of the ideals that had brought about the original Orange Revolution, regardless of whether we agreed with his specific political views.  Obviously, we were wrong.  Motivated by political ambition, he showed himself as capable of double dealing and betrayal as any of the morally corrupt characters that have dominated Ukrainian politics since independence.

One should not attach all the blame for the final collapse of the Orange coalition on Moroz alone.  Yushchenko and the Keystone Cops that constitute his Our Ukraine faction share major responsibility for this unfortunate disaster.  His incomprehensible insistence that Poroshenko, the godfather of one of his kids, be Speaker was key in precipitating last week’s meltdown.

Since last year’s collapse of the original Orange coalition government, Poroshenko has been one of the most unpopular politicians in Ukraine as evidenced by all polls.  Had he run under the previous riding electoral system, he likely would not have gotten elected to Parliament at all in this last round.  He only made it on the basis of being included on the Our Ukraine party list.  Aside from the leadership of the Our Ukraine faction, nobody wanted to see Poroshenko in the Speaker’s chair, and eventually that unpalatable prospect obviously motivated Moroz to reconsider his options.

Although the recent parliamentary election vote clearly indicated that the majority of reform-minded Ukrainians supported Tymoshenko rather than Yushchenko, the Our Ukraine faction learned few lessons from their electoral humiliation, and continued to behave as if they were still the driving force of the Orange movement throughout the difficult negations of the preceding several months.  Their priority should have been ensuring the continuation of the ideals and principles of the Orange revolution.  Instead, their primary focus seems to have been to curtail the political influence of Yulia Tymoshenko.

Incredibly, they viewed their primary opponent and enemy as being Tymoshenko and not Yanukovych and his resurgent Regions party.  This shortsightedness and what can only be viewed as political stupidity now has Yanukovych and his band of self-serving oligarchs returning to power, a prize that Yushchenko has effectively handed him on a platter.

The Revolution now seems to have come full circle.  Our Ukraine will likely now disappear into Ukrainian history as an abject political failure.  Yushchenko has now used up all his political capital and goodwill with the Ukrainian people and, likewise, will go down in history as a sad, tragic and inadequate figure, failing miserably to live up to the expectations he had created.

The hopes and dreams that still remain from the Orange Revolution will now rest in the hands of Yulia Tymoshenko, the only figure to emerge from this sorry mess with her reputation and integrity relatively intact.  Undoubtedly, she will by default assume leadership of what is left of the Orange movement and be the prime contender for the Presidential office when Yushchenko’s unsalvageably failed tenure ends in 2009. 

In the meantime, it looks like Ukraine will have to bear another Yanukovych government.  Its longevity though is also fortunately uncertain.  A coalition consisting of a supposedly reformist Socialist party, a “big capital” oligarchic Regions party, and an ideologically obsolete and anti-capitalist Communist party will have its own difficulties in staying together for any length of time.