PSPU Has No Idea What Vitrenko Will Propose

At that, their answer was essentially Japanese: on the whole, the PSPU is not against a single candidate of the Left, but before the CPU expresses its attitude toward "utter anti-Communist," "chief anti-Communist and anti-Socialist," and "provocateur" Oleksandr Moroz, the Progressive Socialists will refrain from making a final decision. At the VII Party Congress on April 10, Ms. Vitrenko once again proved her genius at telling people completely opposite things equally convincingly. First she said to journalists that it is now impossible to discuss political problems, and all efforts should be directed to the "rescue of the nation". She had hardly finished saying this, when she added that the next party congress could consider the issue of nominating a presidential candidate.

The Progressive Socialist leader expressed her willingness to sit at the bargaining table with the Communists, Peasant Party, trade unions, and public organizations to support the strongest presidential hopeful who "will be able to lead the country out of crisis and build a socially just socialist society." This was immediately followed by the statement, that the PSPU is going to oppose "so-called leftist parties," considers the struggle of the Left with the current regime a "decorative struggle" being waged "for the sake of revenge of the nomenklatura." According to Vitrenko, the "Communists, Socialists, Peasants, and other leftists, having united around capital using Communist ideas as a cover, are building a bourgeois state."

Further, Ms. Vitrenko assured the audience that the PSPU had always demanded dismissal of the current "pro-American government." (We should remind you that the October 13 roll call data shows that of the whole PSPU, only Ivan Kuniov voted against bringing down the government, which was one of the reasons he left the faction).

As to Ms. Vitrenko's statement that her party had never supported Leonid Kuchma, one cannot deny it for the moment. But it is also obvious that the PSPU's struggle against Moroz is much more consistent.

Should one try to translate all the party leader said from the Japanese, one could assume that the party will nominate Ms. Vitrenko. However, even without that, the PSPU is currently associated with the Presidential Administration, rather than with the Left. Thus, it should be pretended that the Progressive Socialists had wanted to nominate a single candidate of the Left, but the other leftists, who are actually traitors to the socialist idea, did not accept the PSPU proposal.

Socialist Party Chairman Oleksandr Moroz while in Kharkiv expressed his conviction that Vitrenko leans on "serious support from the regime" (Interfax-Ukraine). Also, Mr. Moroz thinks that if the authorities continue to promote the leading Progressive Socialist, "the President could come up short in votes." In general, experts treat the polling data (according to which Vitrenko and Kuchma hold top positions), with a certain degree of mistrust, for they know only too well the psychological impact produced by the results of a poll on mass consciousness: the people are inclined to vote for the person whose victory is predicted by the mass media. This is   why the publication of popularity rankings on the eve of elections is prohibited by law.