Deputies show they can make decisions
The 347 votes the people’s deputies cast July 4 for Sviatoslav Piskun, contender for the office of Prosecutor General of Ukraine, became a true sensation. The all- time record set by the previous- convocation Verkhovna Rada, when Pavlo Lazarenko was stripped of parliamentary immunity, has thus been broken.
On the other hand, the overall voting result was of little surprise. Volodymyr Moisyk, chairman of the law enforcement oversight committee, told his colleagues that the committee had decided to recommend the parliament support the candidature of Mr. Piskun. Then the deputies listened quite halfheartedly to the candidate himself, which leads us to conclude that his program speech could hardly affect the choice they had made earlier. Incidentally, the audience heard the main thing that might be expected from the Prosecutor General designate: in Mr. Piskun’s view, the Prosecutor General’s Office is to be reformed and “ existing outdated approaches to its functioning must be revised.” Asked by Oleksandr Turchynov, one of the Yuliya Tymoshenko bloc leaders, whether he was prepared to take legal action against the high officials mentioned in the Melnychenko tapes, Mr. Piskun said he was prepared to serve the people of Ukraine and obey the laws passed by Verkhovna Rada. The Prosecutor General’s Office is supposed to investigate criminal offenses rather than indulge in political persecution, but it makes no difference who commits these offenses.
Another person who scored a triumph was Petro Poroshenko, chairman of Verkhovna Rada’s budget committee: the 223 votes to reject the Anatoly Kinakh government’s report on fulfillment of the 2002 budget compensated Mr. Poroshenko for his disappointment the Thursday before last, when a similar draft resolution failed by ten votes. In his words, the budget committee received no suggestions or remarks about the original draft, so the resolution turned down earlier and the one passed remained unchanged in both form and content. What could have made another seventeen deputies express their dissatisfaction over the Kinakh cabinet’s performance? The most plausible version is that Mr. Kinakh never managed to muster additional support in the parliament, thus receiving, so to speak, the first official wounds from the fragments of the never really United Ukraine.
The deputies did not approve the guidelines of the 2003 government budget policy and offered instead their own comments and proposals. Both Mr. Poroshenko and his first deputy from the Party of Regions, Valery Konovaliuk, called the parliamentary version of the resolution “constructive,” “socially-oriented,” “business-friendly” and “economically sound.” This was not without reason, as it became clear. The only question is whether it is realistic, from the pragmatic point of view, to “ease the debt burden on state finances,” “increase the level of real per capita income and individual purchasing power,” “pay off wage and salary arrears in the public sector,” etc. This, as well as many other things, should be inscribed, on the basis of a tax reform, in an “indisputably balanced budget.”
Yet, the budget resolution is of a rather general nature, as it should be. It even has some quite specific advantages such as virtual abolition of special funds and hence of their abuse. But the Cabinet of Ministers will report precisely on general points in the fall. It is easy to conclude that the evaluation of the government from the perspective of the budget resolution will depend largely on who will be holding the No. 2 executive office. Incidentally, Mr. Poroshenko still considers it possible to vote on dismissal of the Kinakh government before the summer recess.
