Where Does One Find a Workhorse?

President Leonid Kuchma will appoint an acting prime minister if the parliament does not approve his candidate, reports Interfax Ukraine. Mr. Kuchma made the statement last Tuesday, May 8, addressing war veterans at a special hospital in Tsyblia, a village in Kyiv oblast. The president is also confident that Verkhovna Rada will approve his nominee. When asked about possible candidates, Mr. Kuchma said, “I agree with all the candidates” and mentioned the names of Mykola Azarov, head of the State Tax Administration; Anatoly Kinakh, leader of the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs; Volodymyr Horbulin, chairman of the defense-industrial complex state commission, and Kyiv Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko. The president says the new premier must be politically unaffiliated: “Today’s premier must be a workhorse pulling the plow, with the driver behind,” he declared, adding, “And I’ll try to hold the plow handles.” The next day the president said a new government would be formed before the end of May. Once again Mr. Kuchma resolutely denied the existence of any political crisis in Ukraine, noting that a cabinet change is “a matter of course in a civilized country.”

Viktor Yushchenko, when asked to comment on Rukh-Udovenko planning to demand from the president his repeated nomination as premier in parliament, said that this matter was “within the president’s competence.” In response to a question about whether he was prepared to head the government again, Mr. Yushchenko declared, “This proposal sounds attractive, but I am aware of a number of circumstances and complications that simply will not allow me to even theorize on the issue.” Yet if and when that happens, there would be a different Yushchenko, he stressed, “It would be difficult to re-enter the government, and I would not be the same person if I did, there would be a different Yushchenko, with different conditions and under different circumstances.”

The former premier is convinced that his successor will have to “break a lot of traditions, particularly in terms of procedures of forming the cabinet and relations with the territories in order to achieve standards capable of providing the central government with more serious and effective levers.” He is also convinced that the appointment of a new premier will be based not on the candidate’s personal qualities, but by the nominating political forces. Personally, he sees the new premier as “any intelligent person capable of continuing the logic and dynamism” of his cabinet, stressing that a sequel to his government’s reform looks very easy, but there is a great risk that the socioeconomic situation will be “thrown back.”

When asked by journalists whether he supports the idea of rallying the political forces around the president who is formally responsible for reform in Ukraine, Mr. Yushchenko replied, “Generally speaking, I am. We are speaking of the uniting of democratic political forces, those aware of the need to unite to get a political majority and assume responsibility for the course of reform.”