A political crisis has been triggered by the Feb. 3 resignation of Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius -- the third reform-minded minister to quit the Ukrainian government in less than two months. Experts are ringing alarm bells, saying Ukrainian politicians must alter their course to accelerate reform.
Abromavicius quit on Feb. 3, saying he didn’t want to be a front anymore for a corrupt system.
Taras Berezovets, head of the Berta Communications consulting company, said his departure may trigger an even “deeper political crisis than the country had in 2005,” when Orange Revolution heroes President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko had a fallout. The fact that Western diplomats backed Abromavicius means that the situation is “serious,” Berezovets says, as “these countries give money for Ukraine’s reforms.”
Hlib Vyshlinsky, executive director of Centre for Economic Strategy, wrote that Ukraine’s “reforms will now either intensify or will roll back.”
Abromavicius joined Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili, Infrastructure Minister Andriy Pyvovarsky and Agriculture Minister Oleksiy Pavlenko in resigning, although parliament has yet to accept their decisions.
Political analyst Kostiantyn Bondarenko said that reforms have clearly stalled, making snap elections necessary, perhaps in September, because the ruling coalition has “no moral right” to rule the country.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is expected to make a progress report to lawmakers on Feb. 16. A 161-pages document was handed to parliament on Feb. 1.
According to Dragon Capital, Ukraine’s leading investment bank, the government may face a substantial shake-up, although it’s “too early to talk about the new Cabinet line-up.” However, the president’s faction — the largest one in the Verkhovna Rada agreed on seven nominations for top jobs, according to faction member Serhiy Leshchenko, including candidates for ministers of agriculture, infrastructure, ecology, health and culture.
One of the candidates that faced criticism was Oleksiy Honcharenko, a former Party of Regions lawmaker, who was nominated for the health minister’s seat. Honcharenko once called for making Russian an official language. He was also a member of pro-Russian Soyuz party, headed by his father, Oleksiy Kostusyev, ex-mayor of Odesa.
Yuriy Lutsenko, a leader of the pro-presidential faction said the list of nominees is not final.
Volodymyr Fesenko, political analyst with the political studies center Penta, said that the most likely scenario is the change of entire government’s Cabinet of Ministers, other than Yatsenyuk.
He doesn’t think elections will change the situation dramatically.
“There will be seven or eight factions instead of the current six, and (Odesa Governor Mikheil) Saakashvili’s party will enter parliament instead of (Yatsenyuk’s) People’s Front. The Opposition Bloc won’t get into the coalition,” Fesenko said.
Berezovets believes the resignation of Abromavicius will benefit Saakashvili.
“It’s not a spontaneous decision,” Berezovets told the Kyiv Post. “He met with Mikheil Saakashvili a day before – and Saakashvili confirmed it – so eventually that’s how Saakashvili started his campaign against the president as he earlier did against Yatsenyuk.”
Andriy Andrushkiv of the post-EuroMaidan Revolution civic watchdog Reanimation Package of Reforms, said Abromavicius’s resignation is “not the end” of the reform drive, but definitely a bad sign as people find it impossible to work with such a “backstage pressure and old system of appointments from above.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk and Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected] respectively.
