How will the composition of the Cabinet of Ministers change?

Will Arsenii Yatseniuk retain the premiership? “Among the candidates the press named as prospective prime ministers, all have more or less real chances in principle,” the MP said. “Except Oleksandr Turchynov, whose candidacy is definitely out of the question. We have a problem now: as soon as we vote to dismiss Yatseniuk (and we have Self Reliance, Fatherland, parts of the PPB and the Opposition Bloc ready to do it), Self Reliance and Fatherland will refuse to vote for the appointment of a new prime minister, because they are interested in a snap election and a reboot of the political system. With regard to Fatherland, though, they really just want to get an influential position. Self Reliance will definitely vote against the Cabinet of Ministers, as they want a principled approach to the issue. Their candidates are Mikheil Saakashvili and Andrii Sadovy.”

“We have three options now: either changing the entire Cabinet of Ministers except Yatseniuk, or a complete change of the Cabinet of Ministers without destroying the coalition, or a new election,” another MP who also requested anonymity explained the position of Fatherland. “We in Fatherland want to change both the Cabinet and Yatseniuk, otherwise we will demand a new election. To form a new Cabinet, we need people who are not suspected of corruption, whether it is a technocrat or a political figure.”

Thus, the rules of the Ukrainian politics have not changed. This means that the price of reckoning for multiplication of the nation’s issues and lost opportunities will only grow, even though it seemed that nothing could be worse than losses of territories and human lives.

COMMENTARIES

Ruslan SYDOROVYCH, MP, Self Reliance:

“Self Reliance does not see Yatseniuk as the next prime minister. The coalition must gather and make a consolidated decision to find a person who can be trusted with state governance and will receive the necessary level of support in parliament and in society for the implementation of further reforms. This person should choose a team of quality apolitical experts and submit their names to the parliament. This is provided for by law. The government’s next actions are a responsibility of the prime minister, so it is wrong for him to blame individual ministers for failures in a number of areas. If the government is inefficient and poorly working, the prime minister should resign with it.

“As for the search for a new prime minister, the People’s Front is absolutely irresponsible in their blackmailing the whole country with this office. They have stopped doing it lately. Therefore, I hope that the democratic forces in the parliament will show a patriotic approach, otherwise such actions will constitute a threat to national sovereignty. We see a variety of candidates for the post of prime minister being put forward now, but what we really need is all members of the coalition coming together to prepare a number of candidates and choose the best one. These are not issues that should be resolved behind the scenes and using the quota principle.”

Oleksandr KIRSH, MP, People’s Front:

“You cannot talk about replacing the prime minister as such without talking about who the replacement will be. Otherwise, we will either have no head of the Cabinet at all, or get Poroshenko’s special version by appointing as the first deputy prime minister his trusted Kovalchuk, who will effectively be the head of government. But should there be an attempt to appoint Kovalchuk as the first deputy prime minister, I think Yatseniuk will immediately resign. If key figures in the Cabinet are shuffled out, he will leave as well. In particular, Yatseniuk explained that should Arsen Avakov resign, he would follow the suit.

“No other candidate for the post of prime minister will get the necessary 226 votes – neither Saakashvili nor Natalie Jaresko, and especially not Borys Lozhkin. Therefore, there is no real candidate to replace Yatseniuk now. So, it turns out that First Deputy Prime Minister Hennadii Zubko would serve as Acting Prime Minister. It is unlikely, though. Had they had a candidate able of getting 226 votes, this conversation would make sense, but it is just a bluff otherwise.

“The key mistake that was made in the formation of the current composition of the Cabinet was that it was not really the Yatseniuk government. The real Yatseniuk government was his previous Cabinet, formed under acting president Turchynov. Today, he controls only three ministries: internal affairs, culture, and justice. All the rest have ministers imposed on him by the ‘fraternal’ political force, who sometimes oppose or sabotage his actions, but it is Yatseniuk who has to answer for it. For example, he had to take the blame for Jaresko who was a candidate of the IMF and Poroshenko, but has been a failure with the budget and tax code. Dmytro Vovk is another example: he failed as Roshen’s representative in Moscow, but now he deals with instituting the economically justified utility tariffs. So, we misunderstand the coalition government seeing it as the government built on the quota principle, leaving the ministers out of the prime minister’s control.

“Since the government has been entrusted to the prime minister, he should form it from among technocrats at his discretion and be fully responsible for them.”