Oleksandr Moroz said he had made up his mind to run for President at last week’s Political Council of the SPU, reports UNIAN. The council will recommend the party’s December convention support the nomination.
Previously, he has declared on more than one occasion that nominating anybody, himself included, was premature (which was not strange, considering that a presidential candidate cannot expect any tangible benefits except being constantly under the public eye). He made the last such statement this June, adding (according to Interfax-Ukraine) that it would be logical if the Left had a single candidate. Now this thesis is coming more into question as it is far from certain whether the communists will support him. It looks like the SPU is getting ahead of itself. Although voices proposing preliminary talks with the Left and Left Center leadership about a joint candidate were heard in the Political Council, most of its members agreed on Oleksandr Moroz, UNIAN reports.
Believe it or not, the Communist Party Central Committee learned about Mr. Moroz’s candidacy from The Day’s reporter Vyacheslav Yakubenko. The CPU will hold its plenum in early October to decide on their own candidate, meaning that the ex-Speaker’s name is not likely to be on the list. It is generally known that the Socialist Party has neither the resources nor the Communists’ large constituencies to run a presidential campaign. In other words, there had to be special reasons for crossing the CPU’s path in nominating Mr. Moroz, perhaps an arrangement with Hromada to back Oleksandr Moroz (as Yuliya Tymoshenko said, although she was not officially speaking on her party’s behalf). Assuming that the long-predicted Moroz-Hromada alliance becomes a reality, his image as a man who told the magazine Kompanion that he did not need to wash his hands (this sounds like something of a double entendre, doesn’t it) will definitely suffer.






