The Annoying Necessity Choice
Arithmetic is a stubborn thing. It shows that a stable parliamentary majority can only be formed today on the basis of an alliance between Our Ukraine (OU) and For a United Ukraine (Ukrainian ZaYedU), the two largest factions. What can be an alternative is not so much a hypothetical alliance of OU, the Yuliya Tymoshenko bloc (YTB) and the Socialist Party (SPU) (to form a majority, it will have, and surely fail, to find another fifty votes) as a power-wielding coalition based on ZaYedU and SDPU(o) (to be strong, the coalition may include not only territorial district deputies but also those OU businessmen deputies who think they have already fulfilled their financial commitments to Mr. Yushchenko and are now exclusively concerned about regaining the funds they spent on the election campaign).
It is obvious that the likely agreement between Our Ukraine and ZaYedU will have a price. The price has been quoted: Ivan Pliushch as speaker and Viktor Yushchenko as premier. Mr. Pliushch himself has been trying publicly to convince his fellow party men that this is not only an appropriate but also the only option.
But this price will suit far from all. On the one hand, ZaYedU party leaders have far-reaching prime ministerial ambitions of their own (the more so that Anatoly Kinakh does not seem obliged to vacate the premier’s chair ahead of time). On the other hand, many OU members are well aware that Mr. Yushchenko, as head of the government, will be under such heavy pressure that the Kinakh cabinet will in fact remain intact (with the legendarily punctual Mr. Kinakh perhaps replaced by the legendarily less than punctual Yushchenko).
Therefore, the OU leader will inevitably have to accept responsibility for more than the possible economic problems (nobody will tell you how to achieve success and simultaneously let the business fellow travelers get back what they lost). Accordingly, this will greatly diminish Mr. Yushchenko’s presidential prospects in 2004.
Thus it is no accident that Borys Tarasiuk, one of the main runners on the OU ticket, addressing immediately after the elections a roundtable organized by the Ukrainian-Polish Forum, announced that Mr. Yushchenko would not be premier again. In any case, he, Tarasiuk, will do his best to forestall this mistake.
Three days later Mykola Tomenko, not the main but the no less known OU member, stunned the public with a diametrically opposed announcement: The OU might strike a deal not only with the party of power, ZaYedU, but even with the Communists to enable Mr. Yushchenko to assume the premier’s office. At almost the same time, Stetskiv, another well-known OU deputy elected in a territorial district, stated: refusal to cooperate with Tymoshenko and a likely alliance with the party of power would eventually derail the prospects of Mr. Yushchenko as a democrat.
Of course, some can interpret these statements as wise prophesy, others as a desire to immediately seize the opportunities offered by power, and still others as moral resistance to cooperation with a regime that murders journalists and fixes elections. But let us instead emphasize a different thing: all the three mutually exclusive statements illustrate well-known differences between the OU’s national democrats and businessmen. They were made by politicians from the same party, Reforms and Order, Mr. Yushchenko’s intellectual bastion. Therefore, there is no unanimity on this fundamentally important issue even in the OU leader’s shadow cabinet.
In these conditions, it is Mr. Yushchenko himself who will have to make the final choice. This will be quite an annoying necessity, with due account of the former premier’s well-known aversion to taking resolute and final steps. Yet, Mr. Yushchenko will not manage in this case to dodge making a choice, and we will see the consequences of this choice as early as in May, during the first parliamentary session.
