Europe is fed up with the immature squabbling of Ukraine’s politicians.
That was the message that Ukraine’s lawmakers brought home after spending three days in Brussels from Feb. 29 to March 2 in talks with European Union officials.
The EU had plenty of reasons to scold.
Parliament wrecked an anti-corruption law that was a vital part of the action plan to cancel visas between Ukraine and EU. The discredited government is mired in corruption scandals. And the ruling coalition de facto broke up after a vote dismiss the government failed on Feb. 16.
“They said they were tired of our political quarrels,” Hanna Hopko, an independent lawmaker who heads parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told the Kyiv Post after returning from Brussels. “They want us to show some team play.”
However, as soon as they stepped back on Ukrainian soil, the members of the two ruling camps quickly returned to their usual bickering.
EU demands
Yuri Lutsenko, head of the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko, the parliament’s biggest faction, summarized the Brussels talks, saying that parliament had two weeks to form a new coalition and a new Cabinet.
“It’s impossible to make deals in a country where the government has lost the parliament’s support,” Lutsenko said.
Allies of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk defended their leader.
Ostap Semerak, a lawmaker with the People’s Front, the second biggest faction in parliament led by Yatsenyuk, accused Lutsenko of lying and said that EU officials supported the current Cabinet.
“Brussels doesn’t like manipulations,” Semerak said. “Europe will not deal with politicians who distort the truth.”
Hopko confirmed that EU officials hadn’t demanded a new government. Instead, they wanted to avoid early parliamentary elections.
More EU demands included the launch the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption, a body that is already a year in the making.
Most importantly, parliament has to repair the sabotaged anti-corruption law. The law was supposed to oblige state officials to file electronic income declarations. But a lawmaker from the president’s faction gutted the legislation ahead of the vote and parliament ratified the watered-down version, infuriating Ukrainians and EU leaders.
Tricks ‘won’t work’
Lawmakers need to fix the law, Hopko said. “It means that all of Ukraine’s attempts to trick the EU, to go around it, to avoid the commitments, won’t work,” Hopko said.
Ukraine has also been warned about the consequences of not meeting EU demands. The European Commission might break up the Georgia-Ukraine group and offer visa-free travel only to Georgia.
Yatsenyuk hangs on
The demand to prevent early election matches the goals of the factions of Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, whose ratings have nosedived since the 2014 elections.
Early elections can only take place if the ruling coalition officially collapses and a new one doesn’t form after 30 days. Today, only the parties of Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko de facto remain in the coalition, with only 217 votes combined votes of the 226 required to pass legislation. But the coalition still exists on paper because the Radical Party, one of the three factions that quit the coalition, hasn’t finalized the process, leaving the coalition in existence de jure.
To prevent early elections, parliament would need to form a new coalition or revive the current one.
The stumbling block is Yatsenyuk. He wants to remain prime minister and has his faction’s backing. But other coalition partners, including most Poroshenko lawmakers, want him out.
“Our faction doesn’t see any possibility of going on with the current prime minister,” Lutsenko told the Kyiv Post. He blamed the government for stalling on the anti-corruption front, including the creation of the new National Agency for Preventing Corruption. “The Cabinet hasn’t done it for a year. We don’t believe they can do it now,” Lutsenko said.
In turn, Yatsenyuk said opponents don’t have a better plan. “Either you offer a realistic alternative program and a team that can implement it, or we stop the mutual attacks, calm your tempers, get over your personal emotions and support (our) plan,” Yatsenyuk said on Feb. 28.
Having failed to pass a no-confidence on Feb. 16, parliament can’t vote again until July. That means the only way that Yatsenyuk will go before then is if the coalition collapses and/or he resigns.
Coalition math
The pro-presidential faction is the biggest, with 136 votes, but its chances of forming a coalition without Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front are weak. The three parties that left the coalition together have only 66 votes, less than the People’s Front’s 81 votes.
That means that if the Poroshenko bloc tries to form a coalition with the smaller “pro-European” factions, but without Yatsenyuk’s faction, it would be at least 21 votes short of the required 226-vote majority.
But finding support from other factions would be almost impossible.
An alliance with the Opposition Bloc, refuge of former political allies of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, is out of the question for the pro-European coalition. And the 52 independent lawmakers can’t help either: while they can vote with the coalition, they can’t formally join because they are not members of a faction.
That leaves the would-be coalition only with the option of courting the other two smallest factions, Volya Narodu (People’s Will) and Vidrodzhennya (Renaissance). Vidrodzhennya (23 lawmakers) backed Yatsenyuk in the non-confidence vote, while Volya Narodu (20 lawmakers), formed by the late millionaire lawmaker Ihor Yeremeyev, voted against him. But both factions have bad reputations for including in their ranks former Yanukovych allies and turncoats who switched parties after the last election.
Prime minister hopefuls
Even if the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko finds a way to push out Yatsenyuk and form a majority to vote for a new government, they would still need a strong candidate for prime minister.
Candidates named include Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Dmytro Shymkiv, Odesa Oblast Governor Mikheil Saakashvili, Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Groysman and Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin.
The front-runner is Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko. She is rumored to have been offered the job by Poroshenko. Neither Jaresko nor her spokespeople would comment.
Lutsenko told Kyiv Post that his faction has intense negotiations with the candidates.
“It all needs to be done within two weeks,” he said, adding that Yatsenyuk’s party must stay in the coalition even if Yatsenyuk is replaced.
The analysts say it’s entirely possible that Yatsenyuk will keep his job with only a slight reshuffling of the Cabinet as the wobbly coalition in parliament limps on. Political analyst Taras Berezovets says this is what the country’s leadership wants. “It will stay this way until summer,” he said.
