JOHN MARONE, KYIV
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT IN CHECK
Ever since pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko came to power, swept into office by the so-called Orange Revolution of late 2004, he has been engaged in a chess match for control of the country, whose future independence has hung in the balance. His chief opponents in this match have been his one-time revolutionary ally, current Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and the pro-Russian villain of 2004, former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.
Throughout the three-way competition, issues under the traditional rubric of East versus West have been blurred, along with party loyalties and the powers of state institutions. A clear winner, however, is now in sight.
Putting populism before principle and self -interest before both, Ms. Tymoshenko has the president precisely where she wants him - in check. As for Yanukovych, the ex-con from the eastern Donbass region is a three-time loser waiting to happen.
It was, after all, the president whom Tymoshenko had always needed to defeat. Back in September 2005, when Yushchenko fired Tymoshenko as his first prime minister, it looked as if she were headed for the country's mounting scrap heap for spent politicians. Then, less than a year later, in the summer of 2006, Yanukovych got back control of the government and started beating Yushchenko like a redheaded stepchild.
Such a situation, similar to the heady days of early 2004, was fertile ground for Tymoshenko, whose unspoken motto might ring something like: Oh, was that your face I just stepped on? As Yanukovych wrestled away executive power with impunity from the diffident Yushchenko, Tymoshenko came to the president's rescue - for a price. To the people, she played the role of a spurned woman who had forgiven the president's infidelity for the sake of the nation. But behind the scenes, the lady in braids was not above sleeping in the eastern camp.
By 2007, Orange Camelot was restored following early parliamentary elections that saw Tymoshenko replace Yanukovych as Premier. Having fumbled the presidency in the fog of fraud through which he had it slipped into his hands back in 2004, Mr. Yanukovych again looked impotent before his supporters in Moscow.
Yushchenko also looked like a strong candidate for Viagra, with the pro-presidential Our Ukraine party forced to take a junior position to Tymoshenko's BYuT faction in a renewed Orange coalition, after coming in a distant third behind the Donetsk-based Regions party in the 2007 snap poll.
The president must have taken consolation in the economic storm clouds gathering on the Western horizon, or in the knowledge that Ms. Tymoshenko would soon have to renegotiate a new price for the vitally important gas Ukraine imports from Russia. As premier, Tymoshenko could be blamed for all the country's woes, including the double digit inflation that she inherited upon taking office in the last days of 2007, he must have thought.
But by the autumn of this year, when it looked like Tymoshenko was cutting a back-door deal with Yanukovych, and (surprising not only to Yushchenko) had significantly softened her tough stance on Russia, the president lost his cool and called yet another early parliamentary election.
Yushchenko probably figured that it was a snap election that had rid him of Yanukovych in 2007, so why not try one again against Tymoshenko? What the president failed to take into account, or simply ignored in despair, was that: (1) Tymoshenko had supported snap elections in 2007 but was now vehemently opposed to them; (2) his popularity had sunk even lower within the last year to a single digit, while the list of his political supporters turned enemies had grown robustly; and (3) with the financial crisis cutting into voters' bank savings and mortgages, the last thing anyone wanted was to have to suffer through another costly campaign featuring the same empty promises made by the same empty politicians.
Ironically, having been hounded his entire time in office by rumors that he lacked the backbone to fight, Mr. Yushchenko soon found himself in a fight which he couldn't win, and, more importantly, which couldn't win him a re-election. When Russia decided to invade Georgia in August, the Ukrainian president rushed to Tbilisi to stand by his equally pro-Western Georgian counterpart as if this was the most pressing affair on his agenda. For comparison, America's Franklin Delano Roosevelt waffled for years before deciding to support the British during World War Two.
In a classic example of the importance of picking one's fights, Ms. Tymoshenko seemed to side with the Russians with a lukewarm condemnation of the invasion. Whatever her guiding 'principles' may have been, the premier, as always, had her finger on the pulse of the nation. Disregarding the support Russia continues to command in eastern and southern Ukraine, even the most pro-Western among the rest of the country are more concerned about their pocketbooks than about what happens in the Caucusus, particularly when those pocketbooks are so vulnerable to gas prices set in Moscow.
But it was neither in foreign affairs nor in economics that Ms. Tymoshenko really showed what one needs to be a successful politician. In what can only be described as a backdoor deal, the premier has finally cornered her rival for the upcoming presidential race at home.
On December 16, Tymoshenko's BYuT faction signed a new coalition agreement with the hitherto neutral bloc of freshly elected parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn and the president's own Our Ukraine (which has shared a faction with another pro-Western party called People's Self Defense since the 2007 campaign). The result is not only that Tymoshenko can stay in power and supported by a much larger majority than the two-point one of the Orange coalition minus Lytvyn's bloc, but that she has completely outsmarted both the president and Mr. Yanukovych.
Prior to this coup de grace, it looked as if Tymoshenko might seek a coalition with Yanukovych - not a nice signal to Orange voters ahead of presidential elections, or alternatively, that she would simply hang on to her thread-thin grasp on power as the country sank into further financial and political chaos. Mr. Yushchenko would have been happy to see either outcome. Now, he is left crying foul, while continuing to hollowly threaten snap elections
Not long after taking the reigns of parliament, however, Mr. Lytvyn ruled out any such elections. He has also spoken out against the president's plans to change the Constitution and called for improving relations with Russia. In fact, on just about every issue that Yushchenko has espoused to the irritation of the Kremlin - creating an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, removing the Russian language from the media and accusing Russia of genocide for the Soviets' role in the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s - Lytvyn has taken the side of Moscow.
But if anyone has any doubts as to whom the new speaker is really working with (at least for now), Mr. Lytvyn dispelled them during a national television interview on Dec. 14: It is my deep conviction that the dismissal (of the Tymoshenko government, which had seemed imminent) is unrealistic and impossible ... even if such a proposal is chaired in accordance with established rules and in line with the requirements of the law on the Cabinet of Ministers, it won't be supported on the floor of the parliament."
As for Yanukovych and Yushchenko - two men who have been identified as the chief antagonists in Ukraine's east-west struggle - neither appears to have foreseen such an outcome. Yanukovych has not only been forced to explain how his Regions faction didn't seal the deal with Tymoshenko's BYuT, but why the Region's staunchest ally in the parliament, the Communists, unexpectedly voted to support Lytvyn's nomination.
Yushchenko's position is no less unenviable. Tymoshenko has not only snatched control of the Orange coalition in parliament, but she did so by exploiting a rift in the president's own party. Along the way, there was insult to injury, as Tymoshenko publicly accused the president of engineering the dismissal of the now former speaker Arseny Yatsenyuk, who had been appointed as a presidential loyalist.
In short, the lady in braids has shown the political skill and ruthlessness worthy of Russian czars and Bolshevik commissars. The presidential race is still over a year away, and in a country like Ukraine anything can happen in the interim, but for now Ms. Tymoshenko is firmly in control of the chessboard of power in Kyiv.
John Marone, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, Kyiv, Ukraine
December 18, 2008
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