The new season: decisive and tough
Today the Verkhovna Rada starts its ninth session of the sixth convocation. The MPs will return after the long vacations. However, many of them spent the summer in Kyiv near the Pechersk Court. The unceasing trials and permanent meetings in Khreshchatyk Street… The summer was not boring at all. One can even say that there was no dead season at all.
What should we expect this autumn? Almost all the political experts share the opinion that the new season will be tough and decisive. The Ukrainian government will have to decide on the pension and land reforms it has initiated. They will clash about the new law on the parliamentary elections. “As for the serious documents, we will primarily examine the questions related to the elections and we will discuss the law “On the Parliamentary Elections,” leader of the Party of Regions Oleksandr Yefremov remarked.
It looks like Ukraine will return to the mixed system since the new bill provides for 50 percent of candidates from the party lists and 50 percent from the majority districts. How-ever, political expert Dmytro Vydrin takes it positively to some extent. According to him, for the first time over the last years we will have a social “lift” called the majority segment. “The candidates will be able to use this ‘lift’ to go up to the top avoiding the party lists, offices and bribes. The forthcoming elections will bring a lot of things we had no idea about. I think we will have few bright people from the regions able to significantly change the political picture. Let’s wait. This is our hope for the renovation,” political expert thinks.
It should also be noted that the politicians threatened to receive a notice of appointment can run for the Parliament through the majority districts. The Kyiv mayor Leonid Chernovetsky and a lot of members of his “young team” are among them. According to the information from the mass-media, former secretary of the Kyiv Municipal Council Oles Dovhy is creating the head-quarters in the Dniprovsky district of Kyiv and the politician Mykhailo Brodsky is working in the Shevchenkivsky district.
According to the information from the political expert Vadym Karasiov, the struggle might be interesting in one of the Kharkiv districts: the former governor Arsen Avakov from Batkivshchyna is likely to fight against the former minister of defense Oleksandr Kuzmuk from the Party of Regions.
The new season is also expected to give the sack to some ministers. Minister of Public Health Oleksandr Onyshchenko and Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk are the first to be fired. Last week the Head of the Presidential Administration Serhii
Liovochkyn nearly predicted the resignation of the latter. The media immediately started hypothesizing and discussing the new candidates… Later it turned out that Liovochkyn’s words had been misinterpreted. UNIAN has slightly corrected its information. Just a few words have changed the meaning on the news into the opposite one: “When asked if Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk will be fired
Liovochkyn answered: ‘Certainly, he will,’ meaning that every minister will be fired sooner or later.”
However, to all appearance, the first point in the agenda will be the conclusion of Yulia Tymoshenko’s trial. It is rumored that the verdict will be announced in a day or two. However, if two weeks ago Tymoshenko was supposed to be sentenced to 6 to 8 years of prison, now the predictions have changed and the doubts rose what this sentence will be. Probably, the European factor has worked somehow.
Last week Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych held a meeting with his Polish counterpart Bronislaw Komorowski. The Polish leader claimed afterwards that he had warned Yanukovych that Tymoshenko’s trial is a serious obstacle for the European integration of Ukraine. He did it not only on behalf of Poland: “Many countries take this trial as political and not the criminal one. I expect that in the nearest future we will find out how the Ukrainian government resolves this problem.”
On Saturday the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe confirmed this thesis: “The major part of the EU share the opinion” that the association treaty between Ukraine and the EU will not come into effect until Tymoshenko is cleared of all the charges.
As is known, Yulia Tymoshenko’s arrest provoked a real storm among the foreign media. Probably, the main question is: how much does Yanukovych care about the reaction of the world community? Obviously, there are a lot of people in the government who want to punish Tymoshenko. Will they shoot the works? Will it be a suspended sentence or an imprisonment? The autumn 2011 will answer all of these questions.
