Correction Work
The Ukrainian parliament’s sittings are often called free shows. Talking to reporters on May 29, Viktor Yushchenko offered his own. He certainly meant to condemn what his political opponents had done when electing the new parliament’s leadership. But it was the four opposition factions [to which Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine belongs] that made the debates in the session hall resemble a circus. Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz said with tongue in cheek that the former leadership was ready to offer new Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn on-the-job training. “But remember that all courses are now for a fee,” Moroz added with a wry smile (he must have forgotten the old wisdom that advises against “talking about a noose in the house where someone was hanged.” After all, when he was the speaker, as well as Oleksandr Tkachenko and Ivan Pliushch, the parliament never avoided conflicts). Serhiy Hmyrya on behalf of the Communist faction proposed bringing into the session hall a copy of the Constitution veiled in black and observe a minute of silence in memory of our “deceased democracy” (members of the Communist and OU factions stood up for a few seconds). And Viktor Yushchenko said mournfully to his colleagues how “his heart ached” and how he would “ask God to send these people (the For a United Ukraine and the Social Democratic factions) who managed to put their representatives into the drivers’ seats a sense of responsibility for what they have done.” He apologized to voters for his and his supporters’ failure to defend democracy,” anathematized the seven “apostates” from his faction who had voted for Lytvyn and thanked his 112 other brethren in arms. Yet, unlike Moroz who announced that his Socialist faction was joining the opposition to the new majority, the Our Ukraine leader did not make such rash statements. And he evaded direct answers to reporters’ questions about OU’s position. Instead, he elaborated on the “complete symmetry” of the Our Ukrainians actions to what is going on in Verkhovna Rada, on the purity of their thoughts and transparency of their position, on the need to look for a “balance of power,” a “formula of political harmony,” etc. The only confession Yushchenko was literally forced to make was: “We truly are an alternative force.”
Summing up the process of the parliamentary leadership’s election, Yushchenko told reporters that he saw no drama in it: “We didn’t win, but we didn’t lose either.” (Recall former Speaker Tkachenko’s notorious phrase: “I’m not the first, but not the second either.”) Another OU member, Taras Stetskiv sounded even more optimistic in his interview with The Day. According to him, neither Our Ukraine, nor its allies, the Socialists and Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc, made a single serious error during the two week election process. “Taking into account the Communists’ weathervane position, Our Ukraine understood perfectly that we would hardly manage to have our own speaker. Our task was to stay out of the dirty games with the pro-presidential factions.” The only mistake, Stetskiv believes, was to give the ballots to the people like Shcherban who had revealed their treasonous nature during the election campaign.
Incidentally, as Stetskiv told The Day, six of the seven branded traitors who voted for Lytvyn and were purged, as Yushchenko put it, from the faction have applied for membership in ZaYedU. They took their banishment bravely: they did not even turn up at the fraction’s meeting where their expulsion was decided. On the other hand, no one ought to complain: the representatives of big business had bought seven-digit tickets for the train named Our Ukraine Election List that brought them safely to the parliament. And what were they supposed to do upon arrival? Watch the OU leader tour Spain? The men of business (not just words) must have a heartache as strong as Yushchenko’s when they see their hard-earned political capital squandered in such a cavalier manner. And further tactical steps by the four? Was it not a heartache to watch Ivan Pliushch’s obviously dead-in-the-water candidacy offered? The high-chance candidature of Viktor Musiyaka withdrawn? Serhiy Teriokhin’s package of candidatures killed as soon as it arose? Was it not disheartening to hear Yushchenko confess that he personally lent one hundred ballots of Our Ukraine to Petro Symonenko to support the Communists’ package of candidates? The hopes for Ukrainian voters’ sentimental compassion will simply not work. Only Yuliya Tymoshenko, once justly called the only man in Yushchenko’s government, had enough courage to admit that responsibility for the opposition’s defeat in the parliament leadership’s election rested with the opposition as well. All the others preferred blaming it all on the authorities. And the Social Democratic leader Viktor Medvedchuk was certainly right saying in his interview with The Day that the main mistake of the opposition was its inability to agree among themselves, although they had a potential 227 votes. “There were ideologically polarized forces [within the opposition], both Right and Left, who simply failed to agree among themselves,” Medvedchuk said. “They don’t want to admit their own mistake: when they sat down to the table, they knew they could never agree. The Centrists could, and they won.” It is possible that even ideologically polarized forces can reach some temporary, situational agreement. But only if apart from antigovernment mottoes, they possess some other instruments to reach a compromise. In this case they do not. That is why we have to watch political shows like this where, as Symonenko put it, actors demonstrate “how things are done in politics” with no wish at all to correct their mistakes.
