What were you expecting?

You don’t know whether to laugh or cry: last Friday the leaders of Our Ukraine (OU), Yulia Tymoshenko’s Bloc (BYuT) and the Socialist Party (SPU), who held a semi-secret meeting to form a “democratic” coalition, “agreed to seek an agreement.” This is not a journalist’s sarcastic remark but the way acting Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov summed up the meeting.

Even more interesting was the comment by the leader of the socialists, Oleksandr Moroz: “We have moved forward a little, but I can’t say that we have decided on everything or that we have decided on anything at all.” The BYuT leader was, as usual, more loquacious. Tymoshenko said that the OU had suggested that the three parties enter a broadly based coalition with the Party of Regions.

“Yuriy Yekhanurov and Roman Bezsmertny suggested that we join a broadly based coalition with the Party of Regions because, according to them, there are no conceptual, ideological, or any other differences among the four forces,” she said. “We categorically disagree with this. We regarded and still regard the Party of Regions as a clan that Kuchma as a legacy to Ukraine. In our view, it is not a party at all, so we just told Yekhamurov and Bezsmertny that under no circumstances will our political force form a coalition with the Party of Regions,” she emphasized.

Also by force of tradition, the OU immediately denied Tymoshenko’s statement. According to Our Ukraine’s spokeswoman Tetiana Mokridi, nothing of the sort was suggested to the BYuT and SPU. “Ms. Tymoshenko, as usual, distorted the essence of Mr. Bezsmerny’s words in the heat of the argument,” Mokridi said.

Is it any wonder then that the Ukrainian public is full of distrust towards almost all governmental institutions and politicians? A poll conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Ukrainian Sociology Service on June 1-11 among 2,011 respondents shows that the prosecutor’s office tops the mistrust list (trust/distrust balance is minus 41 percent).

The president and the cabinet have considerably increased their level of distrust - minus 20 and minus 39 percent, respectively. Tellingly, the level of trust in the newly-elected Verkhovna Rada is as low as in the previous one. In other words, parliament, which has not even begun full-fledged work, is already “in the minus.” Meanwhile, as the director of the Ukrainian Sociology Service, Oleksandr Vyshniak, noted, in practically every country in the world the level of public trust in newly-elected parliaments is much higher than in the previous ones.

Nor is there a single politician in Ukraine who enjoys total public trust. Fifty-one percent of respondents distrust Yanukovych, 56 percent, Moroz and Tymoshenko, 57 percent, Yushchenko, 61 percent, Yekhanurov, and 68 percent, Symonenko. “In comparison with March 2005, the changes are really striking,” says Iryna Bekeshkina, head of research at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation. “At that time, the results were just abnormal: the president was trusted by 60 percent and had a trust/distrust balance of +43 percent, the cabinet’s balance was +35 percent, even the old Verkhovna Rada showed +33 percent, although public trust in it touched rock bottom. In other words, figures have plummeted at a breathtaking speed.”

Sociologists are convinced that the public’s attitude would improve if a coalition were formed soon and the government took resolute measures to stabilize the domestic situation.

Still, in spite of all the political peripeteia and dwindling trust, post-election preferences have not changed essentially. Should elections be held now, they would in fact repeat the March results. Sociologists explain this as follows: first, mass awareness changes rather slowly and, second, Ukrainian society has already structured itself politically.