But three months later, it’s hard to say that the coalition even exists on
paper.
An official list of the deputies that joined the coalition has never been
published, and all requests from the Kyiv Post to see such a list have been
ignored. No coalition agreement, which was to have been signed between the
factions, has even been made public, either.
Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy was asked about the coalition list twice
in the past week, and both times said he wasn’t “in a position to demand to see
such a list” – a ridiculous explanation from the person who is charged with
overseeing the work of the parliament.
It’s as if the coalition doesn’t even exist formally.
A coalition agreement is supposed to be published on the parliament’s
website. The website currently shows the agreement of the former coalition.
That coalition agreement, entitled “European Ukraine,” was created in
November 2014 and signed by five factions: the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, Yuliya
Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, Samopomich, Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party and
Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front.
The coalition fell apart in February when the parliament attempted but
failed to unseat Yatsenyuk as prime minister. The unsuccessful vote threw the
country into a three-month political crisis.
The parliament badly needed a new coalition to nominate and vote in
Yatsenyuk’s successor, but the only two factions who wanted that to happen –
Poroshenko’s Bloc and People’s Front – together had only 217 votes out of the
226 required to form a new coalition.
Samopomich, the Radical Party, and Batkivshchyna refused to join their
former partners in a new coalition, for various reasons.
During March and April, the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko lured independent
lawmakers into a voting majority. Together with the People’s Front, the
president’s bloc has managed to scrape together a majority of 227 lawmakers and
pronounced it a new coalition. That majority voted in Volodymyr Groysman as the
new prime minister, and parliament continued its work.
Speaking in parliament in mid-April after Groysman was voted into the
premiership, Poroshenko said that some independent lawmakers had joined the
coalition. But absurdly, there is still no way to establish who they are.
At that time, the Kyiv Post asked to obtain a list of the coalition
members. Three months later no such list has even been forthcoming.
Emailed request to the parliament’s press service for the list of
coalition members has gone unanswered. The press service of the coalition’s
leading faction, the Bloc of Poroshenko, says it doesn’t have the list.
An expert on constitutional law, Yuliya Kyrychenko from the Center for
Political and Legal Reforms tried to find the list on the parliament’s website on
the Kyiv Post’s behalf. She failed.
Eventually, the top man in the Verkhovna Rada, Speaker of Parliament Parubiy,
was asked about the coalition list .
Last week, Parubiy was asked about the coalition list at a political talk
show “The Right to Power” on Ukrainian television’s 1+1 channel.
“As a person who is not a member of any faction, I don’t have the right to
demand (to see) the list of the coalition members,” Parubiy said.
I couldn’t believe that strange excuse. So at a press conference given by
Parubiy on July 18, I decided to check whether I had perhaps misunderstood him.
I recited his quote and asked who can see the list of the coalition
members, if not the head of the parliament. Because without there being such
list, it seems that the coalition doesn’t actually exist.
In an oxymoronic response, the speaker said that his job was to ensure that
the parliament works, not make sure there was a coalition. But if there is no
coalition, according to the constitution the president, in consultation with
the speaker, should call for the dissolution of parliament.
And if there is in fact a list of coalition members, and the ruling coalition
is alive and legitimate, then why a list of its members so impossible to find?
Perhaps the lawmakers think that what happens in the parliament is none of
the nation’s business?
That would explain why journalists weren’t allowed to listen when Groysman,
as a potential candidate for prime minister, was presenting his action plan to the
parliament in order to persuade them to nominate him. Usually all parliament
meetings are broadcast live on a special TV channel. But this one was done
behind closed doors.
The message indeed appears to be: What we do here is none of your business,
you poor regular Ukrainians. We can have secret meetings when we want to. We
can bend the parliament rules the way we need. And we can invent a coalition out
of nothing, and you won’t even notice.
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected]
