Opposition Without Alternative

The recent airing of President Kuchma’s vision of political reform turned out to be a smart tactical move, no matter what analysts might say about the substance of its basic idea, one to which the opposition responded with yet another wave of emotion. Incidentally, this wave followed what has become the traditional pattern. On the eve of the rally, the Shevchenko District Court — at the insistence of the Kyiv City Administration — traditionally banned rally participants (this time, though, the ban concerned only the Batkivshchyna {Fatherland} Party) from parading through the capital’s central streets to the Lukyanivka pretrial detention center where UNA-UNSO activists are held in custody after being sentenced for causing civil unrest on March 9, 2001. Rally participants traditionally demanded early presidential elections as well as changes in the political system. However, unlike at the September 16 rally last year, this time nobody demanded that an extraordinary session of Verkhovna Rada be called and that the date for early presidential elections be appointed. Yuliya Tymoshenko traditionally called on her comrades-in-arms to use “this last critical chance” and nominate a single candidate for president from the opposition. The same was repeated by Viktor Yushchenko, now looking more resolute than he did at the March 2 congress. As he put it, “We should nominate a single candidate for the 2004 presidential elections, no matter what the price. Otherwise, we will be doomed to failure once again...” Could the rank-and-file participants of the rally have been led to a mistaken conclusion that this statement by the Our Ukraine leader is a signal of his readiness to side with the opposition for good and burn his bridges with other blocs? Could the step made toward the opposition three on March 9 eventually be followed by another two steps back?

The two remaining leaders of the opposition quartet, Petro Symonenko and Oleksandr Moroz, did not breathe a word about a joint candidate. And this was not without reason: the CPU leader has already announced that the Communists reserved the right to follow their own path in the election campaign. As for the Socialist Party leader, he once (in September 1999 when the Kaniv Four was created) solemnly promised to keep to any verbal arrangements on a single candidate. What came of his promise is a story of another politician on an ego trip.

Meanwhile, Yuliya Tymoshenko’s argument to the effect that the opposition “has no right to divide into rightists and leftists or according to any other criteria...” holds no water either. To accept such an argument would mean to agree to the fact that the opposition is degrading before our very eyes, having neither ideology nor beliefs, which makes it a hodgepodge of political forces. Perhaps we would be better advised not to feel too overjoyed that the leaders of the opposition four appeared in public in full strength, but to think which of them will lead the others and where? And if it is true that the four have already distributed — or intend to distribute — the top state posts among themselves, where will the present opposition take the country should it come to power? Incidentally, some opposition members almost broke rank following the rally, with the Communists off to lay flowers at the Lenin monument and Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc to decorate the gates of the Lukyanivka detention center. However, none of the leaders of the four followed the protesters.

The March 9 rally was quite well attended, with no fewer — if not more — people taking to the streets than during a similar rally half a year before. And this is only natural, since the rallying potential of society is as high as before, and regrettably we do not have a different opposition. On the other hand, the main events, as before, will happen not in the streets but in Verkhovna Rada. What alternative to the president’s initiative, if any, will the opposition put forth in the parliament? And how much unity is there in the ranks of Our Ukraine taken separately? Maybe we will get answers to these questions soon.