Pliushch’s Trajectory

The past week in Ukraine made an impressive display of the politics of paradox and paradoxes in politics. It is paradoxical that both the government and the parliamentary majority, apparently supposed to follow the same presidential line, are crumbling. It is equally paradoxical that those who favor the president’s resignation are demanding that Leonid Kuchma defend the Yushchenko cabinet. Both sides, both the cabinet’s opponents and advocates, are turning a completely deaf ear to each other’s arguments, while the premier’s followers, aware that the previous tactic of cooperation promises no longer works, fly into fits of open hysteria. Yet, the efforts of Verkhovna Rada Speaker Ivan Pliushch did help to win some time. The only question is who will take advantage of this time and how, with the pro-presidential factions being sure that the credit of compromises and confidence in Mr. Yushchenko has expired. The cabinet shares the same view, suggesting that the majority name candidates to take ministerial portfolios for posts now vacant. For example, this was done by First Vice Premier Yuri Yekhanurov. Sooner than not, this is again a question of winning time.

Parliamentary Rules Committee Chairman Viktor Omelych (Labor Ukraine) told Interfax-Ukraine on April 21 that the committee suggests that parliament discuss the cabinet’s performance on April 24, hearing “a report of the government,” not that of the prime minister.

On Thursday evening the Verkhovna Rada session hall saw the collection of signatures for dismissing Speaker Pliushch, who had engineered this stay of execution for the cabinet. After all the Communist deputies signed on, the list then went to the SDPU(o) fraction. Labor Ukraine and the Democratic Union were simultaneously collecting signatures. Only the supposedly pro-premier factions voiced their support for Mr. Pliushch who, incidentally, was in the hospital on Friday.

Heorhy Kriuchkov, representing the Communist faction, thinks the dismissal of Mr. Pliushch is highly probable. In his words, the speaker “grossly violates procedure,” “selectively” conducts the sessions, and has even “hurled insults at some people’s deputies and the parliamentary corps as a whole.” In addition, Mr. Kriuchkov said, the speaker had said earlier he would resign if a vote of no confidence in the government were passed.

Meanwhile pro-premier forces and the opposition behave as if there will be no life after Mr. Yushchenko’s political death. On April 20, the Forum for National Salvation made a characteristic sloganeering statement assessing the results of Verkhovna Rada voting on the government’s report as the formation of a “venal Communist-oligarchic parliamentary majority” the President of Ukraine needs so badly. This is aimed, the document says, at “an unheard-of cynical redivision of Ukraine, whereby the Communists sacrifice the independence of Ukraine to the Kremlin and the criminal oligarchs take an unlimited hold of the national wealth.”

Incidentally, according to the Cabinet’s analytical department, all important government bills, including a number of codes, were most staunchly supported by the Labor Ukraine, Rukh-Udovenko, and SDPU(o) factions. It seems like there is no place for lawmaking: society must be saved from the “Communo-oligarchs.”

Both the opposition and the premier’s backers are preparing a show. On April 24-26, members of rightist parties — among them both Rukhs, Reforms & Order, and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists — will hold a vigil in front of the parliament building in support of the Yushchenko government and Speaker Pliushch. Plus, some would add, getting more foreign support by means of horse-trading in “a danger to Ukraine’s reforms and independence.”

Indicative is the statement of Yuri Kostenko, who said in a BBC London Bureau live show that “the government to be formed after Premier Yushchenko’s resignation will fall into international isolation, for the international financial organizations will not work with a Cabinet of Ministers that relies on the Left majority.” Incidentally, at the same time in Kyiv Valery Lytvytsky, chief of the premier’s advisory team, said he foresaw no changes in relations with these respectable institutions should the cabinet be replaced.

Reforms and Order leader Viktor Pynzenyk expressed a no less resounding sound bite that on Thursday “we all witnessed an attempt at an anti-state counterrevolution.”

Meanwhile, the Yushchenko affair seems to have served as a catalyst for the reunification of the two Rukhs: on April 20, the UNR, NRU, and Reforms-Congress factions announced their intention to work as a single bloc in the Ukrainian parliament. These factions’ leaders said they had begun to form a united centrist bloc of national democratic forces. Mr. Kostenko explained this would be an inter-faction Center-Right bloc aimed at exerting a unifying influence on voters. Mr. Kostenko also said, Interfax-Ukraine reports, that the UNR faction was quitting the parliamentary majority “because it has changed its ideological coloring.” Renowned appraiser of ideological purity Yuri Kostenko did not specify if his UNR would continue its partnership with Fatherland.

The president said on Friday in Kharkiv that he was not going to speak in favor of any of the sides, for this could be construed as pressure. Simultaneously, Interfax-Ukraine reports, he categorically opposes the dismissal of Mr. Pliushch. In other words, the head of state preferred to stay clear of the fray: the cabinet still has a chance to cut its way out of the logjams resulting from its own style of working with the majority, while the majority still has a chance to deny the fact of its death.

In any case, this week is going to see a culmination, in many respects, and, therefore, the ensuing showdown.

Comment

Oleksandr DERHACHOV, political scientist:

“The current situation, if analyzed with due account of today’s developments, leaves the Yushchenko government almost no chance for survival. We must obviously be ready to see the period of a still more tense and involved political situation. Today neither Azarov nor Bankova Street can adequately influence those who have joined efforts against the Yushchenko cabinet. The president still has, in principle, a certain freedom of maneuver because he has not taken sides quite clearly, but he already has a limited arsenal of leverage instruments.

“After parliament finally passes a vote of no confidence in the Yushchenko government on April 26, the pro- premier part of the parliamentary majority will lose any logical sense for its existence, while the pro-presidential part of it will become a majority as such. On the other hand, debates on cabinet performance brought forth a new, clearly situational, majority capable of working in some more cases: many key problems connected with preparation for the parliamentary elections will perhaps be addressed by this majority. The rest will depend on who will hold the administrative resource in his hands.”