Passionate love or cold calculation?

A new “married couple” has emerged on Ukraine’s political stage. The heart of the BYuT opposition could not resist the wooing of the Party of Reforms and Order (PRP). The PRP, now led by former finance minister Viktor Pynzenyk, decided to merge with the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc in late October, but the “newlyweds” chose to marry only a month ago.

Pynzenyk thinks it was a mistake to unite with the Pora civic party in the last parliamentary election. Addressing his party’s 12 th congress last Sunday, the leader of the PRP said that the party had done its best to unite all the Orange political forces on the eve of the parliamentary elections, but this never happened.

According to Pynzenyk, once it became clear that the BYuT and Our Ukraine would compete in the elections separately, the PRP tried to join Tymoshenko’s bloc but failed. “We had to opt for a risky election project with the Pora civic party. The election results showed it was a political mistake,” Pynzenyk said. But the PRP thought that everything was possible and never stopped paying court to the BYuT. As it turns out, their efforts were not in vain.

The 12th PRP congress approved an agreement on the joint responsibility of the BYuT and the PRP. According to this document, both parties plan to form a joint shadow cabinet and support the same candidate in the next presidential elections. Although the candidate’s name has not been officially revealed, behind-the-scenes gossip hints that it will be a woman who wears a braid. They have also agreed to draw up joint lists for the next elections to parliament and local government bodies, and promote the formation of joint factions and associations within local councils.

Pynzenyk also announced that the union with the BYuT envisions an equal partnership rather than fusion. He emphasized that the PRP would continue to endorse the idea of the unity of the Orange forces. “The disunity of the Maidan forces is the road to nowhere. It can only suit the crisis-making coalition.”

At the congress PRP activists were greeted by Oleksandr Turchynov, first deputy leader of the BYuT faction. Before that, Pynzenyk had announced that the BYuT leader was expected to attend the event. “We are awaiting Ms. Tymoshenko, but Boryspil Airport is letting us down: no planes are allowed to land because of fog. Even a Boeing from Dubai was diverted to Dnipropetrovsk,” he said. Last week Tymoshenko visited her home city of Dnipropetrovsk.

While Tymoshenko was unsuccessfully trying to conquer the skies and quickly reach the PRP congress by chartered flight, her No. 2 made a public confession, citing the BYuT’s achievements and setbacks. “The election lists are our worst mistake: they are unacceptable because a lot of random people have teamed up with our political force just to worm their way into parliament and local councils.”

At the same time, Turchynov noted that for the first time in Ukraine’s history the last elections were based on the proportional representation system, and it was impossible to sift through approximately 200,000 candidates in two months. According to Turchynov, there are more than 30,000 people working in local government bodies, but “obviously not all of them have the right to be among us.” The BYuT’s deputy leader also stressed that the party is capable of critically assessing its performance and working on cleaning up the lists.

Then Turchynov moved to the subject of successes. He believes that the BYuT may be the only political force that has always upheld a consistent position and therefore has not betrayed its voters. “The bloc leaders are not ashamed to look their voters in the eyes,” he concluded.

The Pora-PRP Civic Bloc gained 1.47 percent of votes in the 2006 parliamentary elections, while the BYuT stole the hearts of more than 22 percent of the Ukrainian electorate in that springtime race.

Whether this political marriage will produce additional political dividends — primarily electoral preferences — for both parties will be clear during the next elections. The lasting nature of the PRP-BYuT marriage will become clear much sooner. Practice has shown that this country’s leading politicians shift their ground quite often and unexpectedly.

There is a fine line between love and hate: this is a key rule of “married life among parties” for Ukraine’s political beau monde. If you analyze all the marriages and divorces that have occurred among various parties in the last few years, you get a very convoluted plot fit for a thriller. One of the most illustrative examples was demonstrated in 2004, when the BYuT and the Communist Party, who are today irreconcilable opponents, tied the political knot with Our Ukraine. What brought Petro Symonenko, Our Ukraine leader Viktor Yushchenko, and Ms. Tymoshenko together at the time was the desire to topple the Kuchma regime. As time went by, they found themselves once again on the opposite sides of the barricades.

The BYuT and the PRP espouse an almost identical ideology, so there is every reason to believe that they will find “marital bliss” in the shared party home. But, quite often it happens that spouses who have wedded out of cold calculation rather than ideological affinity have family harmony and discipline. An example of this is the anti-crisis coalition. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Party of Regions, the socialists, and the communists have nothing in common in the ideological sense. But on the surface they can be a role model for many politicians, who quite often wash dirty linen in public and thus rapidly lose favor with voters.