JOHN MARONE, KYIV
UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT ON “DEFROST”
Ukraine’s parliament has long been characterized by frozen deadlocks. Lawmakers who opposed former President Leonid Kuchma were always in a cold war with his supporters, while under President Viktor Yushchenko, the legislature became divided between the Orange and the Blue. These stalemates have occasionally burst into fiery rhetoric and even heated tussles in the session hall, but the usual atmosphere in the nation’s legislature has been one of icy relations between opposing sides, and thus few laws being passed. When bills did get approved, you could be sure that a backroom deal had been cut, with the two agreeing parties dividing up some spoil only to immediately resume their hostility thereafter.
More recently a somewhat different climate has taken hold in the Verkhovna Rada, a defrosting of traditional blocs and possibly another chance at the formation of a grand coalition on the horizon. The politician most immediately to be affected by the thaw is parliamentary speaker Oleksandr Moroz, whose surname translates as ‘frost’.
Together with his Socialist Party, Mr. Frost, or Moroz, looks destined to be the country’s next spent political force. This isn’t the first time that a powerful Ukrainian politician has melted from the scene. For example, Viktor Medvedchuk, who rose to head the influential administration of President Kuchma, was reduced to obscurity after failing to get into parliament last year.
Like Medvedchuk, Moroz developed a party with a limited voter base into a pivotal power broker. Through shrewd maneuvering, Moroz ended up with the deciding share between the eastern or Blue bloc of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and the Communists, and the more Western-oriented Orange parties represented by President Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and Yulia Tymoshenko’s ByuT faction.
Moroz had sided with Yushchenko and Tymoshenko during the country’s pro-Western Orange Revolution, which unseated Kuchma and demonized Yanukovych. But following the March 2006 parliamentary elections, Moroz joined a parliamentary coalition with Yanukovych’s Regions Party and the Communists, which then went about assuming much of Yushchenko’s executive authority.
Now, however, the Socialists could end up out in the cold. The snap elections called by Yushchenko earlier this year are almost certain to take place, and polls consistently show that the Socialists won’t make it over the three-percent hurdle.
Oleksandr Moroz has done everything in his power to derail the elections, but the fact is that he doesn’t have much power left. For one thing, Yushchenko, with the help of Tymoshenko, managed to dismiss the current parliament, leaving Moroz without a job.
During a Socialist Party Congress held in Kyiv on Saturday, Moroz called the snap elections a ‘criminal sham’, for which the opposition – i.e. Yushchenko and Tymoshenko – will have to answer. But Moroz’s position is weakened by the fact that his coalition partner the Regions Party, which controls the most seats in the legislature, has already agreed to take part in the elections. And when Moroz tried to show that he still wielded some power by calling for an emergency session of the parliament late last month, the Regions didn’t support him.
In short, the Socialists’ dismal showing in opinion polls make them useless as political partners.
And the president’s team has been busy putting the last nails in the Socialists’ coffin by hitting top party member where it hurts. Socialist Interior Minister Vasyl Tsushko fled to Germany, supposedly for health reasons, after his misguided raid on the Prosecutor-General’s Office in May. Tsushko’s attempt to keep Yushchenko from firing the prosecutor-general did nothing but making him liable to criminal charges. He’s since returned to Ukraine, but his political future looks grim.
Then there is Socialist Transport Minister Stanislav Nikolaenko, who is under a barrage of fire from the Orange camp following a string of rail accidents this year. Socialist privatisation chief Valentina Semenyuk looks likely to take the blame for the country’s poor privatisation record, which may cause Ukraine to be downgraded by international rating agencies.
All of these politicians, together with Moroz, will feature prominently on the Socialists’ election list - for better or worse. Moroz tried to bolster party morale on Saturday by denying that the Socialists had betrayed their values when they joined a coalition with Regions.
But clearly the party has seen better days.
Socialist heavyweights like former Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko and Yosef Vinsky, who left the party last summer, have already realigned themselves with Yushchenko and Tymoshenko respectively. Others may follow, joining either the Regions or the Communists to stay in power.
Once considered a rare example of political integrity for his unswerving opposition to President Kuchma, Moroz has been labelled a traitor and political opportunist by his former Orange allies. As a leftist, he also enjoys little support among business interests.
Only last summer, analysts were predicting that Moroz, having ditched Yushchenko, would go about empowering the parliament to eventually sideline Yanukovych. It was Moroz, after all, who had most vehemently supported the constitutional reforms that made Yushchenko vulnerable to grabs for his authority.
As parliamentary speaker, he was well positioned to play the president off against the premier, while beefing up his legal authorities along the way.
However, now Moroz’s political power has begun to melt, possibly signaling a warming of relations between Ukraine’s main two political blocs.
Regions has traditionally enjoyed support in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east, where attitudes toward Moscow, the Russian language, the Russian Orthodox Church, etc, are markedly different than in western Ukraine. But the east also represents heavy industry and the tycoons who have built their fortunes on it.
Regions Party moneybags Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, has led his peers in seeking better relations with western financiers to obtain badly needed investment. Metalinvest, a steel and mining holding owned by Akhmetov recently landed a $1.5 billion loan, the biggest credit ever received by a private Ukrainian company, from a group of European banks.
More recently, the tycoon has taken steps to clean up the image of the party he belongs to. During its party congress on Saturday, the Regions unanimously refused to include lawmaker Oleg Kalashnikov, who last year roughed up a television journalist at a Regions rally, on its ballot list. Analysts say Akhmetov and more moderate members of the Regions have taken charge in the party and are improving relations with the Yushchenko camp. Ever since the Orange Revolution, the country’s politics have been shaped by the standoff between west and east, between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. Now the ice blocks may be melting. It’s too early to tell, as Yushchenko is still smarting from the last time he tried to cut a deal with the Regions. After agreeing to endorse Yanukovych as premier last summer, the president saw his ratings plummet and watched helplessly as Yanukovych challenged his every authority. Much will depend on the September 30 election results. But for Oleksandr Moroz and his Socialists, the writing is already on the refrigerator door, right near the dial that reads ‘defrost.’
John Marone, Kyiv Post Journalist, based in Ukraine.
August 6, 2007
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