JOHN MARONE, KYIV
TAKING OFF THE GLOVES
The presidential campaign in America is still a three-way race between Obama, Clinton and McCain. But in Ukraine, where the elections are still two years off, it’s everyone against Yulia Tymoshenko.
Appearing before a government meeting on Wednesday, March 26, to mark her first 100 days as prime minister, the fiery female politician said her opponents had already begun attempts to undermine the fragile pro-Western majority in parliament.
“They are not only talking about it, but taking steps every day to discredit the government, to discredit the democratic coalition,” Tymoshenko said.
Tymoshenko’s adversaries include the Ukrainian parliament’s eastern-looking opposition as well as President Viktor Yushchenko, whom she is expected to challenge for the presidency in 2010.
Tymoshenko helped Yushchenko rise to power during the 2004 Orange Revolution, but since then the two politicians have barely been able to mask their enmity with the public proclamations of democratic unity that enabled them to forge the current coalition.
More recently, rumors have abound in Kyiv that the presidential administration is planning to marginalize Tymoshenko by creating a new centrist party from the business elements of the opposition and the pro-presidential elements of the Orange coalition.
On March 27, one day after Tymoshenko rang the alarm bell, the creation of just such a party, called United Center, was announced.
The groundwork for United Center was laid by five pro-presidential lawmakers in mid February, when they left the Our Ukraine party.
At the time, the maverick lawmakers assured Orange voters that they didn’t plan to leave the Orange coalition in parliament.
Our Ukraine, which Yushchenko endorsed during the last parliamentary elections along with a new party called People’s Self Defense, has long been considered divided between the president and Ms. Tymoshenko.
Now that division might spread to the coalition. Altogether, the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko and Our Ukraine-People’s-Self Defense hold only 228 out of the parliament’s 450 seats – a three-seat majority.
If Tymoshenko’s political enemies can get enough support from the business elements of both Our Ukraine-People’s Self Defense and the opposition Party of the Regions, they can try to create a new majority with or without new elections.
The desired result of this plan, which analysts say originated in the Presidential Administration, would be to push Tymoshenko, on the one hand, and the neo-Soviet elements of the Donetsk-based Regions Party and their Communist allies, on the other, to the fringes of Ukraine’s political spectrum in time for the 2010 presidential elections.
The head of the new party, Ihor Kril, said during a March 28 press conference that the head of Yushchenko’s Secretariat, Viktor Baloga, had nothing to do with United Center.
Moreover, he denied that the new party was the brainchild of anti-Tymoshenko oligarchs fearful of her rising popularity.
“We won’t take money from clans or [business] groups,” said Kril. However, he added, the new party welcomes the addition of “strong people.”
So far United Center boasts only 35 members, including those who left Our Ukraine in February.
But more influential support is on the horizon.
Yushchenko is already widely believed to have moved closer to Regions moneybags Rinat Akhmetov, appointing one of his people to a key state post earlier this year.
Then last week, in a rare media interview following in the wake of the United Center announcement, Ihor Kolomoysky, one of Ukraine’s richest men said his Privat business group supported Yushchenko “100 percent.”
The normally camera-shy Ukrainian oligarch said during the same interview to the Internet publication Ukrayinska Pravda: “If Tymoshenko becomes president I see myself emigrating.”
Tymoshenko blasted Kolomoysky for dirty business practices at around the same time.
Speaking to a press conference on March 28, the fiery female premier also accused unnamed politicians of protecting Kolomoysky.
“What Private is doing today in Ukraine shows that they have the required protection in the highest echelons of power,” Tymoshenko told reporters.
But the prime minister fell short of directly implicating President Yushchenko, reiterating her conditional promise to support him during the 2010 elections.
“If there is normal and harmonized cooperation between the president and me, and we are able to work like a single team and show the public results, then I will definitely make sure there is a single candidate put forward by the democratic parties,” she said.
Instead, Tymoshenko focused her attack on presidential chief of staff Baloga.
“I think that the president should act as he thinks best for Ukraine. If there are advisors capable of leading him astray, it would be better if he got rid of them before it’s too late,” she added.
During a national television interview on March 27, Tymoshenko warned her opponents that if BYuT were forced to go through early elections they would do even better than last time.
Last September, during snap elections called by Yushchenko to keep Regions and their leftist allies from usurping his executive power, BYuT improved its showing by almost a third – largely at the expense of the president’s waning popularity.
“I am certain that this government is here for the long term,” she said on national TV, “even if these political forces are plotting something behind our backs.”
But it’s precisely Tymoshenko’s rising political support that has earned her so many enemies.
Besides Yushchenko, who appears to be garnering increasing support from Ukraine’s powerful industrialists, including those who backed his political nemesis Viktor Yanukovych up until recently, Tymoshenko is up against the likes of the Kremlin, whose hopes of controlling Ukraine with gas imports have been foiled by the fiery femme fatale.
The Kremlin had also backed Yanukovych’s long battle against Yushchenko, but could be now placing its bets on Yushchenko, who is more cooperative than Tymoshenko and a stronger candidate than Yanukovych.
Like Tymoshenko, the president can only lose by revealing the growing antagonism between him and the premier to the public.
However, Mr. Yushchenko could hardly keep quiet during last week’s exchanges in the media.
On the one hand, he told an audience in Kyiv that he would do everything to keep the democratic majority together.
But on the other, he warned against political instability and political populism (the usual charges made by Tymoshenko’s opponents against her).
“[Our] nation and society must come to the point where any political destabilization will be seen as a policy against Ukraine,” he said, urging his countrymen to keep “the wave of social populism from covering us and throwing us back to 1993.”
And as both the president and the premier prepare the public for a possible rift in relations, there are a host of thorny issues on the horizon that could serve as the straw that broke the camel’s back.
For one, Tymoshenko’s team has accused Kolomoysky of using his control over a major oil refinery to raise petrol prices and thus make her government look bad.
Another is this year’s budget, which Tymoshenko is refusing to seriously rework despite the president’s demands.
Whatever issue serves as the prelude to a break in relations, uncovering the fierce battle for the presidency that has been in progress since Tymoshenko retook the government late last year, the question is whether the premier’s growing popularity among voters will be enough to defeat Yushchenko’s growing reliance on eastern influence and money.
John Marone, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, Kyiv, Ukraine
March 31, 2008
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